FAR Colony

[farcodev]

Hi,

I present FAR Colony (or First Autonomous Remote Colony), a simulation of space and colony management.

It's not the first time i try to complete this project (in fact it's the 3rd and last iteration), due to a lot of design errors, amongs other things, by myself. But this time this 3rd is the right one ! I expect a fully playable beta in the end of 2011.

Main features already implemented:

- a realtime game flow
- 2 space units missions: interplanetary transit and colonization
- the Colony Simulation Model (or CSM): manage each colony data + population (including birth/death rate + mean age) + their events (like Uprising, or Overpopulation) including progressive evolution and recovery

in development for the next release (0.4):
- the Socio-Political Matrix (or SPM): inspired from Civ4 policies, each SPM item can be a policy the player/AI can set or a meme which cannot be set but directly and progressively chosen or rejected by the population itself.
- an Unified Macromanagement Interface (or UMI): regroup most of data in this 2nd level interface, keep interfaced w/ the 3d ui

upcoming for the 0.5:
the production system (for infrastructures, space units and products items)

for screenshots, you can look at the gallery here: http://farcolony.sourceforge.net/index.html

[code_glitch]

Really nice work. Keep it up. Glad to say that this works a treat on wine 1.3.6 on ubuntu 10.10... Dont know if there is supposed to be any audio or the controls, but poking around like crazy for 15mins with not a single error, thats quite clear for me.

[Sascha Willems]

Great to hear that Far Colony is still alive. I'm a sucker for those 4X space games (started working on one myself a long time ago) and I've been following your game's progress for years now (I even posted some news on it over at delphigl 3 or 4 years ago) but was afraid development was stopped. So it's nice to hear you're still working on this gem!

[farcodev]

Really nice work. Keep it up. Glad to say that this works a treat on wine 1.3.6 on ubuntu 10.10... Dont know if there is supposed to be any audio or the controls, but poking around like crazy for 15mins with not a single error, thats quite clear for me.

Thank you ! Hehe it's cool to know that it works on Linux, i began this 3rd iteration w/ FPC-Lazarus but due to GLScene limitations at these times, i switched back to Delphi (and so win32 only). I plan to port FARC back on Linux one day but only when i'll have a 2nd PC so not before 1 or 2 years... It's a cool new that i'll put in the readme for the next release.
There's no audio for now, until the beta 0.9 is out, and you can access on the control list by raising the help panel by hitting F1 when the 3d view is displayed. Thanks again for your testing ! :)

[farcodev]

Great to hear that Far Colony is still alive. I'm a sucker for those 4X space games (started working on one myself a long time ago) and I've been following your game's progress for years now (I even posted some news on it over at delphigl 3 or 4 years ago) but was afraid development was stopped. So it's nice to hear you're still working on this gem!

Thanks Sascha ! :D ya 4X are pain in the ... to dev lol. In fact it's the third, and last time, i work on it. I made a lot of mistakes for the 2 previous ones: bad design documents, not solid game concepts, lack of a global and complete vision of the game, bad workflow planning and so on .... ;( But perseverance pay a day or another, and all the work previously made isn't really lost, but needs serious cleanup.
For this one the todo list is done until the total completion at the 1.5 version, at least for the main work, and the current game design docs are of no comparison w/ what i done before.

[farcodev]

Here's a new screenshot of the upcoming 0.4 w/ the SPM (Socio-Political Matrix) trees which begins to be populated w/ policies and memes.

http://farcolony.sourceforge.net/pics/SS-2010-11-28_22.17.13s.png (http://farcolony.sourceforge.net/pics/SS-2010-11-28_22.17.13.png)

There's a big game design job for set the basic data of each meme or policy.
I need again to set the policy enforcement user's interface and game system (partially implemented) and implement the monthly process of the policies and the memes.

job job job... still incomplete but alive and progressing :D

[farcodev]

0.4 is nearly to be finished, i'll try to complete it tomorrow.

For reminder this major version contains as major features:
(nearly completed for this version)
- the Socio-Political Matrix (or SPM): inspired from Civ4 policies, each SPM item can be a policy the player/AI can set or a meme which cannot be set but directly and progressively chosen or rejected by the population itself.
(completed for this version)
- an Unified Macromanagement Interface (or UMI): regroup most of data in this 2nd level interface, keep interfaced w/ the 3d ui

This version alone takes 4545 new lines of codes, mostly for the SPM, and growing again.

[Tsunami]

This looks interesting... I'll give it a play when 0.4 is out :)