Hard Light Productions Forums

Hosted Projects - Non-FreeSpace => StarShatter Open Source Project => Topic started by: aki on April 14, 2022, 12:32:04 pm

Title: Starshatter: The Open Source Project (or: Ignore This Fork)
Post by: aki on April 14, 2022, 12:32:04 pm
Hi there, hello,
For past months I've been tinkering with the Starshatter source code. Amount of time I put into it varies, with peaks here and there and times of inactivity, especially in the community-involvement part. I've been mainly writing small update posts on spacesimcentral and my personal blog. I also got in touch with starshattermods. Time has come to write here, after my account got activated.
Now then, the long term goals for my little project are getting Starshatter build under Linux (which is a tremendous amount of work and includes moving away from DirectX), having some programming fun, and having some multiplayer fun, too.
So far, I have been making a steady progress towards small sub-goals. My current closest target milestone is a headless server built under MinGW without linking it to DirectX and minimizing reliance on WinAPI. As for what is done already:
The repository is located here: https://git.ignore.pl/starshatter/
I also created a small landing page for the project: https://ignore.pl/starshatter/

Now, one last thing, I call it a fork, but I don't want to really separate or steal a project from HLP. It's my own little thing that I decided to do and I'll be happy to integrate with this community. I hope you like it.
Title: Re: Ignore This Fork
Post by: Thaeris on June 08, 2022, 01:08:37 am
Hey, that's really cool what you're doing! I wish you the best in what you're doing, and I wish I had the skillset to join you. I do wish there was still a larger interest in this sim here, but at this point, you might be on your own. Otherwise, perhaps you can try to find the other coders on GitHub and work with them. If you want to catch some more help with this here, from those that can help [here], you might want to make a bit more noise when you update your blog, etc.

Again, thanks!
Title: Re: Ignore This Fork
Post by: aki on June 17, 2022, 04:11:21 pm
Yeah, it's a bit shame that the Starshatter community peaked at like 20 people and never went above it. Honestly, I don't think GitHub would magically help, as it didn't work out in last iteration (few years ago). I appreciate the good words! It's a bit quiet now, because I'm tinkering with other projects for now and planning my next moves here. I have some ideas that are intended exactly for making some noise, we'll see how they work out when we get to them. :)
Title: Re: Ignore This Fork
Post by: Vidmaster on July 16, 2022, 07:14:18 am
That is actually a really cool webpage you put together there. Short, clear, to-the-point and informative. Just the name of this thread, well...    its weird  :rolleyes:
Title: Re: Ignore This Fork
Post by: aki on July 20, 2022, 02:57:18 pm
Just the name of this thread, well...    its weird  :rolleyes:
Which part? The fork? Or the ignore?  ;)
Title: Starshatter: The Open Source Project - End of September Development Update
Post by: aki on September 24, 2022, 10:04:08 am
I'm back! There wasn't too much community activity over last few months but nonetheless I've been selectively giving some time to this project. Today I present you with "End of September Development Update". Long version is available in the dev blog over here (https://ignore.pl/starshatter_open_dev_update_2022_09.html). Short versions are available, well... here and in spacesimcentral forums (the content is obviously similar).

I'm still focusing on internal parts of the implementation with some rare changes that could be seen by the player. One major addition in this build is vox and music data that was missing. It has been integrated into the automated packaging process and resources are now hosted, so any future build will also contain these. This has been requested in ssc forums.

Another rather big change is removal of Datafile utility in favour of a new dat tool, that is very similar but the underlying implementation is completely new and written from scratch. The main benefit from the whole effort is compatibility with POSIX/Linux platforms. The same new dat format implementation has been integrated into Starshatter itself making another step towards being able to build it on Linux.

Small news for community, I created a Discord Server (https://discord.gg/6GFacfuyBP) to help interested people contacting me in a more responsive way than any of the forums. I hope HLP stuff does not mind it, as there is no channel for Starshatter over in HLP server.