2019-12-08 10:02:30

OK, i realy want to put this here cause it is a damn great command:
"g +1" or "g -1" will let you switch through all your colonies so you dont have to keep in mind their names or numbers.
Thats realy realy great!

2019-12-18 07:50:48

I just wanted to check in here because this game keeps giving me hours of fun. I understand development's on hiatus, but I have a couple thoughts and suggestions. I have no idea how feasible these would be, but here goes:
1. I'd love a way to filter enemy ships and planets by race. This could come in handy especially on big maps with fleets going every which way. It'd be nice if I could type something like "v f Meklar", or "v Psilon 6" if I'm in the middle of a war for example and want to find targets without filtering through everyone else's colonies. I find I spend a lot of time scrolling through lists looking for the next place I want to invade and this filter would help a ton with that.
2. Similarly, I end up spending a ton of my time scrolling through all the fleets within my scanner range, trying to find out if any of my planets are being invaded. I don't know how this was set up in the original MOO game but I could see how part of this might be a skill you're supposed to learn. still, there has to be a better way than reading through a list of sometimes 30 plus fleets every turn until you hear one of your colony names show up somewhere. I'm thinking either an automatic message when scanners detect something en route to a player colony or, perhaps easier, another filter just for fleets headed to player colonies. Maybe that syntax is already there and I've just not figured it out? I'm thinking something like "v f a" (alert, approaching, I don't know I just haven't seen A used in the filters anywhere), but really any kind of way to see just the fleets enr route to my planets would be a godsend.
3. It'd be nice to get a notification when a planet builds a missile bases the same way we do with ships. Maybe some people wouldn't like that but I really would.
4. Now we're really in nitpick territory but I'd love to be able to adjust multiple production sliders with a single command. I sometimes find myself accidentally pulling production out of eco to build a new ship when I want to pull the points from tech research, or having my increased industrial production pulled from tech research when I want it pulled from ship building. I know I can fine tune this by setting each slider separately and I've gotten enough of a sense for how the computer likes to prioritize my production orders that these mistakes only happen occasionally, but they're still a pain. Rather than having a production lock, I'd love to be able to tell it something like "s e 15; i 30; def 5, t 50" or maybe even "s t -5; i +5." I don't really have a formal computer or math background so maybe this isn't possible, but if so it'd be really nice.
Anyway, thanks for your patience with my ramble. If none of this ever comes to fruition, I'm content, this is a hell of a proof-of-concept and I'm super impressed you pulled it off so well, Still, a guy can hope, yeah? smile

Boldly going where everyone's already been.

2019-12-18 09:17:04

Very very great Summary of the main points. I agree with all of them.
We mentioned a lot of them before. But it is nice to see this all in one post.

2019-12-30 08:53:34

Hi,

Thanks Xcline for bringing this to our attention. I'm so excited and yet so depressed at the same time once I mastered the interface. Elated because this is probably one of the most complex accessible strategy games that I've found, and depressed because this was first released in the 1990s, so I can't imagine how much more intricate modern 4x games are like.

Documentation feedback:

1. This game was basically unplayable for me until I understood how the filters could be combined using the view command. The way that the in-game command reference is written would only make sense for someone used to reading documentation for CLI tools, so I think having examples of usage in the accompanying rtf reference would be useful. For example, "v 6 u" shows all unexplored planets, "v YC" shows all your colonies and "v OFT" shows enemy fleets and transport in range of your colony's scanners.
2. It took me quite some time to figure out how the fs command was supposed to work, e.g to send 3 ships of design 4 to planet 5, you had to type "fs 5 0 0 0 3". An example would really be helpful here.
3. Its not mentioned anywhere that you could refer to planets in 3 ways: by numbers, full name or by an offset. So for e.g, both "l -2" and "g +1" work.
4. Could you add some info on how the governer works? Is it a feature in the original game, or one specific to this version? It sounds like it would be useful, especially on this game now where I have to manage 30 planets individually.
5. When viewing the output of the fleets command on your own fleets, the numbers are displayed in accordance to the ship design order that you have. How does this work for enemy fleets? For e,g "Dist  8: IN ORBIT [43] (99,176) Tao                   0     0    19     0     0     0  Klackon". This could be a medium ship, or a huge ship potentially if the ordering changed.

Bugs:

1. attempting to toggle the planetary governer with gov causes the following error for me in some situations: "FATAL: lib_sprintf: buffer too small, need 12, have 12Cfg: saving configuration to '.\1oom_config_game_cmdline_nop.txt". This is also particularly nasty because it doesn't autosave for you on crash, so you get restored to the last save state. It keeps on happening on a specific planet, with 11 chars I suspect its a length limitation.
2. I sometimes see the display of incoming "phantom fleets" of my ships when I use the look command while on it. They don't actually show up on the fleets screen and ship count don't change when they supposedly land, so I think this is a bug.

There're some things that are much harder because all the information is presented textually:

1. I find it really hard to get a sense for the geometry of the galaxy just by using coordinates alone. I think this would be a major problem for these types of 4x games, and not having easy access to information like where the boarders of your sphere of influence are and where it is adjacent to enemies makes certain things really hard. Has anyone found a way around this?
2. Have you figured out how to control your ships manually in combat? So far I've always clicked auto resolve, but being able to manually control your own ships is critical for high level play and to properly utilize special devices which I don't think the AI can do for you.

Feature requests:

1. It would be extremely helpful if there was a filter for fleets with your planet as a destination, which can be combined with the O filter to check for invading enemy fleets. Otherwise, the best that can be done now is to crawl through the huge amount of output from the "v OFT" command. The look command should also show incoming enemy fleets on route to the target if you already have enough tech to be able to see that information with the v command. Similarly, some way of filtering output by race would be nice too.
2. Another related idea is to have automatic notifications that an enemy fleet is approaching one of your colonies that appear when you advance to the next turn.
3. I think other filters for the v command could also be useful though much less critical. E.g, by habitability, the presence of special bonuses like artifacts etc.
4. The technologies screen is missing a display for your tech level.
5. When given a choice to choose techs to research from, it would be helpful for the associated long description of the tech to be printed besides its name so that you don't have to look it up elsewhere.
6. The look command doesn't display the class of planetary shield present. I understand you do see that info in the original game.

2019-12-30 18:24:53

Hello everyone,

Where could I download the Game at? Did I miss it in the thread? Is it on S t e a m? I Google it but unsure if It is the right application. Any help would be appreciated.

2019-12-30 19:07:35

Hi All,

Victorious, wow, that's a big post, I appreciate the feedback.

The planetary governor is new to the 1OOM reimplementation. It does help with the micromanagement, but I'll have to do some searching to figure out where your buffer overflow is. If you could post a save game, I'll see what I can do. There is some documentation on how the governor works, but its' in the \doc directory, which I haven't touched.

The map issues are definitely problematic in larger galaxies. Unfortunately the coordinate code is hard for me to understand, it doesn't directly seem to map onto parsecs, as would be most natural. I need to have a look into it and see if I can at least explain it better.

The issue of tech descriptions and more of the game text in general is definitely something i've been trying to figure out how to solve. I'm not as familiar with C as I'd like to be, and the game's code is a little baroque. I can just say that I totally agree more of the game text for flavor and tech descriptions would be helpful.

I'm still here, even if I have trouble sticking to one project for very long. The game is at least in a more stable state, apart from the few bugs.

2019-12-31 01:12:36

It's stable and playable, I keep coming back to it and games don't usually keep me interested for this long. I'm amused, however, we're all basically suggesting the same stuff.

Boldly going where everyone's already been.

2019-12-31 07:06:28

@zkline

I heard that the original project author is dead, i.e this repo is no longer accepting anymore fixes: https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/

Is there an unofficial successor / developer who's leading future work on this, or which forks of this repo are the most active? Also I understand you've contributed some fixes in the past, which repo are they at? I have some experience with C, so would be interested in fixing some of these issues.

2019-12-31 09:33:17

@mmaslo1124 look at the first link in this thread.

@zkline regarding the gov crash, try starting a new game with a world named "NerveCentre". Then when the game starts, type gov.

I've been thinking about some ways of how we could get a better sense of the galaxy and how planets are laid out. I'm not sure how helpful it would be if there was a way for a program to take in a list of points, and let you explore that interactively, with 3d audio beacons that play at each position. This would be useful not just for this game.

2019-12-31 13:32:02

I realy think that it would be more important to work firstly on improving all the combat stuff cause it becomes realy important later on a longer match.

2020-01-01 15:37:47

I've been thinking about an idea to get a better hang of how the galaxy works. Would like to hear more opinions on whether this could be feasible.

I'm thinking of an application which reads a list of coordinates and planet names, and puts that in 2d space. It would then lay it out on a 2d grid and discretize each cell. I could divide the grid so that each grid cell is 2 parsecs wide (2 times 5 units according to the official strategy guide).

Lets assume that (0, 0) is the bottom left, and that the galaxy can be 200 x 200 wide or 40 parsecs on each side. Then you could use the arrow keys to move about the grid.

When your cursor is on a particular 2 x 2 parsec sector, your position in space would be set to the centre of that sector. When sounds for each planet in that sector are played, it would be relative to the centre of that sector, which should in theory give you a way of understanding how things are laid out. So you would only be hearing things inside that region, and would have to arrow around to explore nearby.

2020-01-01 19:37:07

Victorious,

Something like that sounds theoretically very useful. I don't have the programming chops for it yet, but I imagine it's fairly easy in any high-level language. My experience so far has been with mostly command-line stuff, which is different.

I'll try and find some time to investigate your "NerveCentre," bug this week. I suspect I know what's going on, but figuring out a fix is always a little harder than it looks.

2020-01-02 17:21:19

That bug with the governer isn't that important, the simple workaround is just to not have such a long name. Anything 10 characters and below is fine. Some of the commonly requested items e.g, new filters for the view command are arguably much more critical.

Btw, which repo is the work being done on now? Since the author's original gitlab repo is no longer accepting new forks. I'd like to take a look and hopefully even contribute some of these much needed features. I especially want to look at how combat is printed on screen, to maybe see if it could be made more accessible because not being able to participate in this vital part of the game takes out a lot of the fun for me sad

I'll experiment with that prototype that I mentioned this weekend.

2020-01-02 18:51:47

Hi,

The current repo is here. The combat stuff is largely located in ui/cmdline/uibattle.c, but those functions are called by the stuff in the game/ directory.

THe basic flow of combat is to print a map display every turn, with symbols like "<." and ">," representing yours and the opponents ship stacks. THe logic behind how those symbols are assigned is a little complicated, but seems to be dependent on race.

I hope you have better luck figuring out where to begin with this aspect of things than I have so far.

2020-01-04 07:31:17

@zkline how active is the author of that fork? In terms of accepting {PRs or answering questions?

It will be really hard to figure out how the ascii art works without some sighted assistance.

2020-01-04 07:46:29

The actual author seems sporadically active, but there's at least one developer who commits fairly regularly and can merge PRs.

2020-02-11 08:08:48

OK, i think we got a little improvement.
With the newest NVDA you can scroll through all console-output by pressing control up and down arrow. So we can read now all the longer stuff like ship-designs and so on.

2020-02-11 20:04:52

Hey,

By pure coincidence I've been re-visiting this game lately and working on some fixes. I'm slowly becoming more familiar with the way the game code operates. I've got a fix for the view command not identifying nebulas, which is fairly important on occasion.

I'm hoping to make my next release all about combat. I've finally understood more or less how the UI handles it, and can begin the process of modifying it. I can't promise a date, but it's coming sometime soon.

2020-02-11 20:20:54

Yes, yeah, yiha and yippi!
Thats simply totaly awesome great!
i still love it idolatrous!

2020-02-11 22:56:57

wil there ever be a mac version

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.

2020-02-12 02:18:06

There IS a mac version, actually. I'm doing all my development on the mac, I just didn't know anyone else would have one and be interested. I can package the current code real quick, but be aware you'll need to use the Terminal to play it, which takes a little getting used to.

2020-02-12 03:50:58

Hi,

Okay, this file is a mac release of 1OOM, as of this afternoon. The only major difference from the Windows version is that nebulas are identified when a planet is part of one.
To run this, you need to unzip the file, and then go into the directory that was created and run the "Orion," program from a terminal. I could theoretically package this up into an app which can be run from Finder but have not looked into how to do that.

I should also note that the fork on which I'm basing my changes had some political arguments a while back, and consequently the changes around the high council and random event options were withdrawn. That might not be of interest to many players, but if anyone wonders where they went, I wasn't involved in that decision.

I may at some point decide to maintain my own fork of the game for command-line only changes, but that'snot happening yet. Things are still in flux.

2020-04-28 09:09:01

Hey hey Zkline!
Is the link in your first post for your latest Version?
Aaaand, HAHA, the more important question:
Anything new about MOO? I mean, are there any new versions out from the main developer?

2020-04-29 16:36:46

hELLO!
sO, i'VE RECENTLY STARTED TO PLAY THIS GAME.
The question is how do I send my scout to an unexplored nameless planet?
The commands are a bit confusing smile

2020-04-29 17:26:06

Ah damn damn damn, i realy should restart my tutorial to give more of you guys an easier start to this absolutely great game.

@Caio: Your first scoutships can only reach planets within a range of three parsecs. So find one with the v command. The last ones should be OK. Then keep in mind the  first Number. This is the number for the planet.
To send your scout you have to type:
fs number 1
Replace Number with what you kept in your mind.
This will send one of your scoutships.
The FS-command is working with the 6 ship columns which you can see with the fleet-command.
The last 1 tells the fs-command to send one ship of your first column.
HAHA, i hope i remember correctly.