The TurnEngine Blog

Hi all,

As you know both myself and Zedd have been chugging away at the Shadow Wars code, and are getting ready for some alphas to try and get the feel for the game and its usability, i recently posted a forum post with an ‘unofficial update’ on our progress, and felt I should spend the time making a full official blog post on our progress!

TurnEngine v3 is coming along nicely, as many of you know, this is pretty much a complete rewrite of the TurnEngine to add massive flexibility in terms of what it is capable of doing, and we’re hoping to showcase this in ShadowWars and future games.. It’s being designed in a way that is hopefully stable straight out the box, and the feature set will be complete. I’ll discuss how we are achieving this later!

Feature wise, we are adding features at a good rate, I’m going to go over what we’ve done so far, and hopefully add what changes have been made since previous incarnations of the engine:

Mail / News

The mail engine is reasonably straight forward, although completely rewritten from the previous version (you can delete mail properly now). For Shadow Wars we are going to experiment a little with merging Mail and News together into one interface, and use filtering to allow you to better refine what types of mail your are viewing. In later versions, we’re also going to allow for you to customise how ‘vocal’ the news system can be, for example a really vocal version would send a news item for every event that’s happening on your planets, rather than just Combat / Invasion

Planets

Planets are going to be similar to what you are already familiar with if you’ve played DarkGalaxy, although there’s going to be nothing special overall, we’re hoping to add a few nice touches to make actions a little speedier. We are also planning on adding filtering mechanisms to the planet list to let you select planets that are for economy, or possible strategic importance. We are also focusing on refining the planet list page to display more planets in smaller space, as well as alphabetising them to help players manage this, especially if it gets long! Below is an early concept of the planet list.

Fleets

Fleets again are similar to what you have seen before, and on top of that will include some of the enhancements seen in the planets page, careful designing will allow you to easily see the composition of a fleet, along with everything it is carrying without having to scroll too much. We’re also going to be adding the filtering system to it, again, to help you organise what your fleets are doing.

Navigation

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the new navigation systems brings a whole new dimension into Shadow Wars over previous TE based games, although due to its complexity, this wont be featuring in the first alphas / betas, we have really high hopes for it, it should allow for more strategic play amongst factions, each fighting over key sectors and outcomes determining the outcome of the war! The flexibility will also allow us to run ’smaller’ games where a handful of players fight out for dominance on a smaller playing field. We have also been discussing a lot of ‘alternate’ usage for the navigation which may make an appearance in the distant future once everything is running smoothly. We’re hoping that the new navigation design is going to lead to some battles of epic proportions where eventually both factions throw everything they have at each other, the winner being the faction which can persevere longest and start creeping forward. Every sector usurped is a sector closer to victory! You just gotta hope you don’t find a massive invasion force packed at a nearby stargate!

Combat

Combat is also something which wont be in the initial alpha for us, but should be a reasonably quick addition, the initial combat calculations will be done for the ‘casual’ game, which is much simpler than the ‘hardcore’ game which will come later, we’re going to be watching things like outcomes and combat score carefully to make sure that the winner will always get a better take of the winnings, and that suiciding fleets doesn’t result in more combat score! One of the things I’m personally looking forward to, is Stargate ambushes, linear travel means your journey from A to Z is no longer safe, there are many points where you could get engaged along the way, good team coordination will help keep you on the safe path!

Alliance

Also not yet implemented. Despite Shadow Wars being a faction vs. faction game, alliances will assist in bringing people together as a ’squad’ in the battle. Where this goes from here is entirely up to the players, will you form a HC with other alliances in your faction to co-ordinate? If so, bring your best diplomats! When resources are spread thin, you’re all going to need to closely work together and potentially commit everything you have to the war effort at once! If relationships start to sour the entire structure of your faction could collapse and fall into chaos, whilst your adversaries are there to clean up!

Trading

As you have seen from the screenshots, there is a trading button, lets talk a little about this, in a galaxy full of combat, there are always those who want to give the upper hand for profit! Introducing the black market. Here you will be able to sell your hard earned resources for credits, and in turn, purchase fully built ships for delivery in a small amount of time at an extortionate cost! This will come into play in a ‘backs to the wall’ moment, where you can sacrifice everything you have in an attempt to repel a full assaulting invasion force. But even if you win, rebuilding your resources and starting to produce ships on your own isn’t going to be easy! Other options open up with this market, supplement your fleets with black market ships whilst going for that final game winning assault in an all or nothing attempt to subdue your enemy, the possibilities are endless!

Backend Communication

We’re working carefully on the technical side to allow for a much faster backend <-> frontend communication, transparent ‘modules’ will run the communication through and allow us to dynamically switch between (for example) a highly optimised and human readable versions of the communication, which not only benefits the people playing, but allows us to very quickly diagnose bugs as and when they occur!

Design

From a design perspective, we’re focusing heavily on simplicity and usability. Although shiny graphics look nice, it’s not always the most practical solution to a problem, we’re trying to keep things clearly labled and layed out on a nice blue palette, using subtle shading of areas we want to draw your focus to, and utilising a lot of colourful icons to prevent the pages from becoming too stale and ‘monochrome’,  there’s a difficult balance of keeping the users eyes focused on specific areas without boring them too much, and being too colourful that it’s difficult to track where you are trying to go. During the design phase, we’re going to focus a lot on these types of elements, in an attempt to create a pleasurable experience when viewing and playing Shadow Wars

Testing

One of the bains of previous turnengine iterations, the number of strange bugs! Something we’re focusing on heavily in this version of TurnEngine is test suites and simulations. There’s a huge library of tests for all individual components of the engine, in addition to a dummy UI to allow us to ‘dry run’ certain features, and test for unusual behaviour. There will of course be bugs in the alpha / beta versions, but we’re hoping that they are going to be minor in comparison to some of the larger (and more obscure) bugs that made their way into DarkGalaxy. Also, as mentioned before, we’re able to quickly switch and monitor what the throughput between the frontend and the backend, which will help us identify the location of a problem and resolve it more quickly.

Full Development in Java

Both the backend and frontend are going to be developed in Java, the departure from PHP for the frontends is one we decided to make together, as both myself and Zedd are good Java developers, we can both be involved in all aspects of the development, it also comes with the benefit that Java is a much faster language than PHP when it comes to handling large volumes of data. It also allows us to speed up the development process, and drop in libraries to ease development, and the Object Oriented nature means fixes for issues should come through a lot faster without having to sift through copious amounts of code. It also has the benefit of having a very powerful debugging suite, which makes it easier to just step through problematic code and find the cause of issues.

We’re hoping to get the first alpha going as soon as we possibly can, and we are satisfied of the quality. Until then, watch this space!