Author Topic: Starshatter: The Open Source Project (or: Ignore This Fork)  (Read 3749 times)

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Offline aki

  • 22
Starshatter: The Open Source Project (or: Ignore This Fork)
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 building process has been remade completely and now uses CMake
  • MinGW tool-chain is supported
  • FoundationEx and NetEx have been updated to build under Linux
  • Definitions have been imported into the repository
  • Datafiles are now built as part of the regular builds and are included in the distribution
  • Project structure and modules have been changed couple of times, but they are still quite fluid
  • General improvements and moving towards POSIX, C and C++ standards in whatever files I work at that moment
  • If you weren't sure if multiplayer worked previously - it does now and address+port binding has been changed a bit to avoid weird situations with multiple interfaces
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.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2022, 02:57:52 pm by aki »

 

Offline Thaeris

  • Can take his lumps
  • 211
  • Away in Limbo
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!
"trolls are clearly social rejects and therefore should be isolated from society, or perhaps impaled."

-Nuke



"Look on the bright side, how many release dates have been given for Doomsday, and it still isn't out yet.

It's the Duke Nukem Forever of prophecies..."


"Jesus saves.

Everyone else takes normal damage.
"

-Flipside

"pirating software is a lesser evil than stealing but its still evil. but since i pride myself for being evil, almost anything is fair game."


"i never understood why women get the creeps so ****ing easily. i mean most serial killers act perfectly normal, until they kill you."


-Nuke

 

Offline aki

  • 22
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. :)

 

Offline Vidmaster

  • 211
  • Inventor of FS2 bullettime ;-)
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:
Devoted member of the Official Karajorma Fan Club (Founded and Led by Mobius).

Does crazy Software Engineering for a living, until he finally musters the courage to start building games for real. Might never happen.

 

Offline aki

  • 22
Just the name of this thread, well...    its weird  :rolleyes:
Which part? The fork? Or the ignore?  ;)

  

Offline aki

  • 22
Starshatter: The Open Source Project - End of September Development Update
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. 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 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.