Nu alpha release 1 is now live

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Hello everyone!

We are very proud to announce the deployment of alpha release 1 (AR1). This release is the first major step toward the new version of VGA Planets. Our goals for this release were the development of the overall user interface framework as well as the hosting framework and data extraction from the original source data files to a more modern database format and we have achieved these goals.

We would now like to invite all of you who have signed up here on the website to have a look and try out the new release.

To try it out, you need to sign in to this website (if you don't have an account click here to register). Then go to the "My Games" page. You will see your current games list and a button for "Create Training Game". In the Nu version there will always be the option of creating a training game where you play against a simple computer player. This is the start of that.

Click "Create Training Game". Currently there is only one option for map type (more will come later) so click "Create" to create the game. It will take a few moments. When you create the game it creates a map and assigns you a home world and runs host for the first time.

Once you see your newly created training game click "Play" to play the game. For now most of the functionality inside the game does not exist, however you should be able to click around and see how the new system will look. Here's a hint, look for the "blue" planet, that is the planet that was assigned as your home world.

You can help us out

You can help us out a great deal by reporting any bugs you find or suggestions for improvements (even very tiny ones) in the forums under suggestions and bugs. We expect there to be some bugs. When you build software for the internet it may work on a lot of people's machines, but not on others. There are many different browsers and we can't test them all. So if it seems like something is really wrong, or you can't load the game please tell us in the forums about any error messages you get and what type of browser/operating system you are using.

We have tested the game on Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 3+ and Safari on Windows and Google Chrome. We do not expect it to work in Internet Explorer 7 or less. IE 7 is still quite popular but is too old for the modern technology we are using. Since we are building for the future, we recommend that you upgrade if you are still using this browser. The best performance overall is in Safari, or Google Chrome. If you are wondering what the heck I'm talking about go here and watch the video: http://www.whatbrowser.org/en/ and I recommend you install Google Chrome if you are using Windows.

You can also help us out tremendously by sending us screenshots of how the game looks on your computer. We know it looks pretty good on our computers, but maybe it doesn't look as good on yours, or maybe it looks better. We would love it if you sent us screenshots of what it looks like on your computer and we will post them here on the site.

Have fun with the new version, more functionality will follow very soon.

Please email any screenshots to us at: admin@vgaplanets.nu

Comments

There are 10 comments - add your comment

robo - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 3:33 AM

Hello,

I created my first training game and didn't see a blue dot for the home planet. I decided to run the turn thinking that it hadn't run the host for the initial setup and then saw that it changed to turn two. I rechecked the map twice and still didn't see a blue planet... so I deleted and restarted another training game. This one worked.

Some notes:

* My homeworld (312 Turning World) is 96 degrees instead of 50.

* My homeworld also has Amorphous natives (no homeworld should start with natives).

* Please add the ability to move the screen via the keyboard arrow keys (in addition to dragging with the mouse).

* Please add the ability to zoom in and out via the mouse wheel.

* Please add commas into your numbers so that a population of 100000 becomes 100,000.

* On planets without colonists and/or natives, the planet screen skips those sections. I think they should still be included and just say zero of each. This way every planet screen looks the same and the unmined minerals section is always at the bottom without being moved up because of missing sections.

* I like that you've added the tax rate effect next to the rate.

* I like that you've added the mining per turn next to the density.

* The planet pictures look great! Just one request... Can you make them all the same size? Some are nice and big, filling the whole section... others are much smaller. It would be nice if all were big. :-)

In case you are wondering, I am running IE 8.

Thanks for your work on this project.

- Robo

hellafax - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 3:49 AM

Looks like a promising start.... I'll echo Robo's comments:
*Defect: (P1) Home Planets = 26 degrees (cold!) -- expected: 50 Degrees.
*FRQ: (P3) Would be nice to see commas in larger than 1k values
*FRQ: (P5) Would be nice to have the 'Buildings', 'Resources', 'Colony', and 'Unmined Minerals' arrow (Blue arrow on right side) look different when the region is hidden (maybe point UP when expanded, and DOWN when collapsed).
*FRQ: (P2) Colony sidebar should not disappear when starmap is dragged.

Is there a public/private bugtracker setup for VGAP? Would be great to have everyones feature requests (FRQ) and defects noted/triaged.

Its a good start guys, keep it going.

Cheers,
Matte

lamin - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 7:32 AM

Nice work. Looking forward to future releases. :)

chank55 - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 10:57 AM

I cannot find my home planet, have tried three or four times - i am using Google Chrome.

hooligan - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 1:03 PM

Looks nice. Pls include:

- A way to draw in 'help'circles and lines (like with vpa)

- A way to measure distances from the navigator screen, jointly with an osnap on planets or gravity wells.

action - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 4:39 PM

Very glad to see the project going on!
Good luck with so much comments, bugs and sugestions. It seems to me that many comments are related to confusion.

pobs - Thursday, August 26, 2010 1:48 AM

Like another person I setup my first training game and didn't see any planets. Having read a comment or two I deleted and restarted another training game. This one worked.

Some notes:

* My homeworld (264) was called Potatoe. I did not feel that was a suitable location to rule the VGA world from ;-).

* Please add the ability to move the screen via the keyboard arrow keys (in addition to dragging with the mouse).

* It would be good to move the screen also by hitting up against the edge and it autoscroll in that direction.

* Please add the ability to zoom in and out via the mouse wheel.

* Please add commas into your numbers so that a population of 100000 becomes 100,000.

* The starmap probably should not recentre every time you click on a planet, it makes it hard to keep your bearings on where you are at.

The red X to close the planet window did not work, I had to keep clicking in black space to close them

My games page - Would be good to have a "last updated display against each game, maybe some sort of colour code for turn "untouched", turn "in progress" (last updated by you), "turn sent" etc.

I am running IE 8.

joshua - Thursday, August 26, 2010 3:42 AM

You guys are all awesome! More than 80 training games have been created by different members in the past 8 hours. Thank you for the feedback and keep it coming. We are taking note of all your suggestions and will be doing our best to accommodate them in the next release.

action - Thursday, August 26, 2010 3:58 AM

Joshua, just a quick question: do you have any idea (a guess!) of when we will be playing the firsts alpha games?

chank55 - Thursday, August 26, 2010 8:40 AM

I would like to see a graphical representation of the unmined / mined materials as a pie chart like in VGA 3

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