Looking for testers - Galaxy Empire
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**I have just put up a new release of the game engine and I am looking for a few testers to help with debugging the multiplayer code. Click the link below to get the autoupdater for the game. If you have used any DB Software programs, it should work fine the first time.
NOTE : This game does NOT use the FL game engine, it is being written from scratch.
Click here to visit the AU thread
Galaxy Empire is a full 3D space and FPS simulator. It is similar to a game called Freelancer made by Digital Anvil/Microsoft. The game has been in development for over a year now and now contains many of the features I had been wanting.
- Examples include asteroid fields containing 10,000 asteroids.
- Thousands of plants and trees randomly placed across the surface of a planet.
- Server-side markets, this includes persistant items which when sold to a base remain in the base’s inventory. These can be bought by anyone docking there.
- 3D rooms are also functional, each separate room on a base can have it’s own 3D model.
- FPS style planet surfaces. For now it is simply limited to exploration but later own it will contain a full-blown first person handling such as fighting, vehicle support and building creation by the players.
- Fully programmable graphics engine, everything is stored in plain text scripts (INI files).
- A scripted FX animation engine including weapon effects and static effects.
- Support for up to 512 star systems.
- Support for up to 256 players online.
- Uses standard DX models for the 3D objects in-game, this means most 3D modeller programs can export to a working model for the game.
- Supports every image format that DX supports including TGA, BMP, PNG, JPG etc.
- Full HUD implementation with triggerable hit boxes.
- System to system jump gate support.
- Fog-of-war style exploration, you don’t get to see the system on your starmap until you visit it.
- Full multiplayer gaming, single-player style gaming will eventually be implemented as story-line missions.
- Supports both cube-mapped and sphere-mapped skyboxes.
- Has full handling of texture sliding.
- The script engine already supports over 500 commands for building the game universe. There will be a few thousand by the time the game is complete.
- Mouse controlled handling is used for moving and targetting.**
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I get the cannot find Ge_setup file error when ever i run GE3D.exe
AppName: ge3d.exe AppVer: 1.0.0.1 ModName: ge3d.exe
ModVer: 1.0.0.1 Offset: 00058b5bim also ruinning on XP home SP3
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**I had thought I fixed that months ago, guess I linked to the old file. Just redownload it from the AU thread or just download the setup zip, decompress it and put the GE_Setup.exe in the AU folder. Sorry, it only runs the setup program once and on mine I was already registered.
If you have a built-in chipset then GE most likely won’t run. This usually means most laptops won’t be able to handle the amount of texture memory the game requires. The minimum video memory is 256 megs and it also requires a minimum of 512 meg of system memory. Also, you must have a shader 2.0 card for the instancing (for mesh cloning) which pretty much leaves out most of the video cards older than 4 years old.**
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Getting some more net Data (I’m Prepaid) in a few days… Will make shure this is the first thing i download Lancer
Nice and “freshly” reinstalled system to test it on too…
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download the setup file byistlf and all is working now !
just gotta remember the controls lol -
**In this version it has been setup more like FL. F2 is go to, F3 is dock, j is jump (will be switched to dock later).
Once docked you can hit ‘t’ for trader, ‘e’ for equipment dealer or ‘w’ for walking on the surface. Since Earth has had the most work done on it, I would suggest jumping to Sol and docking with Earth. To relaunch, hit ‘d’ to go to the docking bay, then ‘L’ to launch (lowercase L). You can dock on the transparent planet in Spawn, but the clouds are completely messed up.
Hehe, I barely missed u when u logged in, I am in the middle of testing the NPC stuff so I was logging in and out.**
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From what I remember LS’ code is memory intensive for whatever reason.
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Yes, it has a full speed handler that eats up quite a few CPU cycles. Most of it is doing background tasks between frames. I am running it on an AMD 3000+ at the moment and it doesn’t significantly slow my system down at all. It is running in a tight loop is why it shows the high cpu usage. It does pass any unused messages to Windows every frame so the Windows message handler does have time to process stuff it is doing. It is similar to the idle tasks that show almost complete cpu usage.
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**Ok, there should be a standard window pop up when you start it up. Then a second window will be created that the actual rendering is done in. The title of the second window is DB3D. Before that window shows it is loading the scripts.
What processor r u using?
How much video mem do u have?
How much regular mem do u have?
Are u using a laptop or a desktop computer?
What video card do u have?
Do you have the latest DX installed?
Can you hit the ESC key and exit the program?
Are you running Vista or XP?
If it’s Vista, r u the administrator?
Do you have any firewalls or virus checkers running?** -
One thing I have noticed is Vista path naming, the (x86) in the file path. Try creating a new folder in drive
named GE then install it there, or simply copy your current installation to that folder. Just remember to change the path in the autoupdater to point to the new folder. The (x86) in the ‘Program Files’ filename screws with my path routine and causes the game to lock up since it can’t find any data. -
All I get is this Screen:
I tested it on an PC with following config:
What processor r u using? Intel E8400
How much video mem do u have? Â 512MB
How much regular mem do u have? 2048MB
Are u using a laptop or a desktop computer? Desktop
What video card do u have? Â NVIDIA Geforce 8600GT
Do you have the latest DX installed? DX9
Can you hit the ESC key and exit the program? Â No all hangs on 100% of one Core
Are you running Vista or XP? XP
If it’s Vista, r u the administrator? Â XP as Admin
Do you have any firewalls or virus checkers running? Windows Firewall with Router and AviraGame was installed in D:\games\Galaxy Empire
An Test on an second PC (Notebook)
Result in this:
CPU is Centrino 1,7 Ghz
Some bad intel Graphiccard dont no more about
512 MB Ram
OS: XP
DX9 -
**For your desktop system, you have plenty of resources available to run the game. The current system I am using (since my dual core MB went kaput) is much less powerful than what you have. I am going to add a bunch of pop-up boxes to show if anything fails during startup. This way you can see without a log file of what isn’t initializing. The screenshot you posted is the base window for the game, it isn’t used, it is part of the MFC view classes. I create a custom window for rendering so it takes over the entire screen. If I used that window, it has alot of problems with cursor positioning, which I had in older DX programs I had written.
The laptop, not surprised it fails, it won’t work on my laptop either. Once I get the startup popup windows installed, maybe it will point out what is causing the crash. If that doesn’t work I will put the code on it and compile it in debug mode and see exactly what is causing the crash.
BTW, does Avira cause problems with FL?**
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Never had anything with Avira so far.
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**A new version is online that includes full failure checking. It should now exit gracefully if anything during the startup fails. I also added a 1/2 second pause after the render window is created, this is so you can see that it is actually being created. It will show a failure if it isn’t created anyways.
I am still unable to get it to work on my laptop but then again, FL won’t run on it either. FL says I don’t have a 3D card installed even though I did a full check using the control panel’s DX app. It says I do and dxdiag works fine on the D3D Device test.
Thanks FF for letting me know about Avira.**
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Dll’d, Installed & Updated ;D
No worries here on a x86 Vista Home premium (32bit)
Specs:
E2220 @ 2.40GHz (dualcore)
2G Ram
2G Readyboosted
NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (512mb)DX & .NET installed to “latest” updates
went smooth as silk m8
just a issue with the installer and my OS (stoped resonding) but i sat back and let it do its
thing and it all worked well when it had completed its download. ;D ;DGame looks good
nice “base” to build from m8 but its ye code that fliped me out… so neat… so organised Great stuff Lancer ;D ;D keep it commin ;D -
**@ Viper - don’t have any other ideas as to why it isn’t working. If you did an update in the last 12 hours you should have the version that has full error checking on everything from the startup till the 3D window appears. Are you able to hit ESC to exit the program, if not, click on the window of that screenshot you posted above, hit ALT then F then X, this should make it exit and save a log. Look thru it for any failures, ignore the ‘unknown commands’ entries, there will be quite a few of those (due to many scripting changes over the past year). If you simply want to send it to me just PM me on here and put the entire log in it.
@ Xarian - I saw where you had logged into the server, I only missed u by a couple of minutes last night. I was testing the NPC code and trying to get the friggin targetting reticles to show up on them. I did finally manage to get it working, turned out I had simply left out 1 single line of code for the nickname hash.
Hehehe, now it’s time to see if it will work on my old 1.8ghz pentium with an ATI 9200 on it…**
