Conman

I've been getting a lot of messages about this game even now... I haven't been on in a long time, here's my reply.

Thanks for your admiration, but the reason I haven't been on in such a long time is that my computer crashed a long time ago and I lost my files for the games I've been making.

I am in progress of creating a similar Callisto game (a better approach by learning from previous developemental mistakes) but I'm not sure if I would be able to complete it... I'm just not on that much anymore; I work on gamemaker at most once a week. :\ It's mainly a small activity I do when I am completly bored.

I may release a source code sometime, it of course won't be the original game but something close. But for now I guess I can consider it abandonware.

Thanks!

Sorry for the delay!

It was a bit interesting. The appearance of the legs happened after one or two generations, I don't think that was very realistic. I like to see these types of sims/games. I would really like to see some more traits/physical/"mental" changes happen over time also, that would be neat.

But there was one thing I disagree with:

This is my most advance ALIFE yet. Why? Because it features mutations both bad and good.

First of all, do you mean it's the most advance ALIFE vs. all simulations? or just GM ones? Even if you meant GM ones, there are others that had good and bad mutations like Evolites and Genetic Pool. Just because the creators didn't write that theirs had good/bad mutations doesn't mean there weren't any. Besides, when could you consider a mutation good or bad? Some mutations that seem bad like - decreased brain size - doesn't mean it's a bad mutation, the creature/species probably didn't need a larger brain to live and reproduce.

If you need any questions answered about evolution or need to know anything about evolution in general, just ask me, I could write a book.

The generation all depends on the random_set_seed and random_get_seed functions... you use a random seed for the universe; use that to get the seed for the galaxies; that to get the seed for the star clusters; that to get the seed for the stars; and so on. No external storage required. Galaxies other than the one you're in can be rendered statically; same with star clusters and stars. By rendering them to a background scene, one can obtain the illusion of a massive universe with no framerate loss whatsoever.

The graphics were done using Xtreme3d (OpenGL), so that might or might not work well on your computer...

Ah, I see what you mean, I understand that, it looks pretty cool. But I was imagining something more complex, accurate and in realtime. If you can't tell, graphics are a major thing for me. I simply don't like to furthur my games without good graphics.

Stars in the galaxy barely move so you can actually generate the star clusters on a surface, even store the surface onto a sprite with sprite_add from surface, possibly a few variations of them for the various zooms... you can also have many objects that do nothing but represent the stars (for clicking). Or loop through and array when the user clicks the screen.

BTW having many instances that have a single pixel sprite is faster that drawing every pixel manually. Up to a point of course.

As for having a ludacrous amount of stars and star systems, you dont use objects but a few arrays. With a galactic time reference, you can update the orbits when you go visit the star system.


As I have said before, I would not mind taking a look at what you have and see how you did things. I could possibly give you some feedback on possible methods you could use...

I actually made a small-scale simulation using a galactic time reference to update the planets/moons/stars, it took a lot of tweaking though, but it does work. As for saving a sprite from a surface, wouldn't it have a large load-up time? or if you zoom in or out, wouldn't the sprite be fuzzy or if the stars were pixels, wouldn't some not be visible when zoomed out far because of gm's resizing techniques? You could use polygons I guess... But I haven't tried this meathod.


The only obstacle for this so far (for me) is getting an accurate representation of all of the stars and most of all making it look good. To be honest omicrongamer, I don't really like the way you did it for only one reason - it doesn't look presentable as in, the star's are too blurry and scales aren't right. I would need a playable version of your screenshot to get a better opinion though, but it doesn't matter.

Have you seen Eve?

http://eve-online.net

This should give you an idea for what you're dealing with as far as combat systems.

Yeah, that game among others was an inspiration to Callisto.

The graphics are incredible. I didn't get to read the whole forum so I don't know if somebody mentioned this yet, but for some reason when I zoom all the way out to 'galaxy' view I can't zoom back in.

Thanks! To zoom back in, just click on one of the larger stars and then do the mouse-wheel.

It's possible to extend the number of stars/galaxies/planets without wasting framerate at all. I made a tech demo once which had 256 galaxies, each with 500-1000 star clusters, each with 500-1000 stars, each with 0-10 planets, each with <=10 cities and <=10 moons... fully 3d, completely explorable; ran at 400fps. All it takes is a bit of rethinking of storage.

Of course it's possible, but for me, gamemaker is the slowest program I have. At what graphic quality or did it not have a detailed zoom-in feature? Also, did the stars/galaxies have orbits, that would really slow my PC down, I have a reeeaaaally old computer. How would you go about drawing the galaxies, star clusters and stars? Just curious, my PC can only handle about 600-700 pixels before losing framerate at a normal 30 fps. So I make all of my games to play well without going below 20 fps on my computer.

But as I said before, only 40-60 star systems are needed from a gameplay standpoint. It would take a little less than an hour to colonize/finish one star system, I don't know of many who would spend months trying to colonize the entire galaxy. But it would be cool just to look at a bunch of galaxies with millions of stars in them, even though you wouldn'n be able to visit them all. If you visited each star system for 10 seconds and there were a million stars, it would take 116 days to visit them all without taking a break or sleeping. :\

btw, I got lots of time and I can help I dont need credit. And if you need scripting I am there I need help to. Because:
1. Are those planers REALY 3D on a 2D space map?
2. how you make that eveyr planet is different?
3. The orbitting system...how you did that?
4. The random generating a Galaxy O_O how the hell you did that? I tried and it went wrong even in 2D...

BTW I want to work on an 3D RTS, but wouldnt it be nice to have Space/Land/Sea/Air combat(just like Supreme Commander and Star Wars) and conquer planets and stuff? Because, this would be fricking cool and I know tactics to cut down memory loss, file size and laoding time

I don't think I'm going to work on this with anyone unless they have a lot of coding experience.

1 - If you mean am I using d3d commands, I am not. I am just creating vertices in a fan with a couple textures.
2 - Upon creation, the planets are procedurally generated, using distance from the sun and some random variables to pick various textures and statistics.
3 - To make the planets orbit is very easy, just some sin, cos calculations.
4 - To make the galaxy, it just randomly places stars acording to an equation that sort-of makes it look like the galaxy has arms. It is capable of creating an infinite amount of stars to visit, but for gamemaker and gameplay purposes, 40-60 is all that is really needed.

My advice to get better at coding is to play around with gamemaker's commands and try to mimic or create new things that you think would be cool. ALWAYS keep trying until you are satisfied and you will learn a lot.