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STARSTRIKE ALPHA 3 CHANGELOG (04Jul08):

- Added frontend main menu system.

- Added builtin support for multiple screen resolutions - no more commandline switches!

- Added multiple game speed settings.

- Added ingame ESC menu.

- New loading screen and music while waiting for maps to load.

- Provisional fix for alien melee attack slowdown bug. A side effect of this fix may cause less intelligent behaviour from aliens during combat. Testing and feedback needed before this bug is listed as officially fixed.

- Added win and fail conditions.

- Tileset updated.

- New pulsing effect for alien structures.

- New visual effect for unbuilt marine structures.

STARSTRIKE ALPHA 2 CHANGELOG (06May08):

- Added line of sight so you can only see enemies your troops have LoS to.

- Optimised mainloop efficiency: better FPS now.

- Reduced bonus res for killing an enemy unit from 1-3 to 1.

- LMG maxammo increased by 50%.

- Shotgun maxammo decreased by 50%.

- HMG maxammo increased by 20.

- Added -win switch to play in a window.

- Added splash screen at boot.

- Reduced resource generation rate by 25%.

- Increased heal rate of Marines at an armory by 140%.

- Increased heal rate of Aliens near a Hive by 140%.

- Increased heal rate of Aliens near a Dc by 70%.

- Added energybars for alien Lifeforms.

- Several new maps implemented.

- Gorges no longer respond to nearby enemy presence by charging to their death. Will now hold ground and spit from present location.

- Added healspray. Any gorge standing beside a damaged lifeform or structure will spray it for a healing effect.

- Alien interface added: Aliens now playable! Use the two new alien maps to check them out.

- Alien special abilities: Leap and Blink! Hold CTRL while issuing a rightclick order. Leap requires two hives; Blink is usable at one hive.

- DC's heal nearby aliens and structures and add 10% armor per DC to a max of 30%.

- MC's increase energy regeneration by 20% per MC to a max of +60%. Also increases movement speed of lifeforms progressively at 1, 2 and 3 MC's.

- SC's increase damage caused by 10% per SC to a max of 30%.

- Marine AI implemented. No Alien AI yet beyond basic raids (with skulks only) and response to attacks.

- Increased power of shotgun and added spread effect to make it a useful weapon.

- A-star pathing algorithm implemented. Units will now always find the shortest path to their destination through complex paths without becoming stuck.

Hello again, your friendly Creative Director and Lead Programmer here with some more rhetoric on development and production!

First of all, the Aliens UI is complete and it is now possible to play as the Aliens, either against another Alien side or a Marine side controlled by the AI. Maps to utilise same-team matches are still being designed.

The Artificial Intelligence is coming along nicely, and the CPU can now competently play as the Marines. It is capable of building a base from scratch, researching technologies, seeking out new resource nodes to build, scouting locations for enemy activity and attacking the enemy position in force. It will rebuild stuff you destroy and keep expanding and researching to keep up with you. It will overtake you if you aren't fast and it is not an easy opponent to defeat! It doesn't obey construction rules yet though; while it will always build a turret factory before sentries, sometimes it will build the sentries before the turret factory is finished being built, or place the turrets out of range of the factory; things like that. Kinks like this will be worked out in time, but the AI is functional and will offer a tougher challenge than before. Other than strange structure placement behaviour (which will be corrected soon), it doesn't cheat, either. It sticks to its resources and spends them appropriately. There are external AI config files implemented so the player can tinker with build orders and research orders if you like, which should provide some longevity as people come up with smarter and smarter AI configs!

Alien AI is coming, but isn't ready just yet. This is harder to implement than Marine AI, but I am working on it.

The A* pathing algorithm is coming along well. Units are now finding the smartest, shortest path to a destination without getting stuck in concave geometric shapes in map design like they used to. There are a few bugs to work out of this algorithm though, but this is the last thing I want completely functional before I release Alpha 2. As soon as it's working to perfection I'll have a new post for people to explore - expect this within the next few days or so!

While you wait for a new Alpha to play with, please continue to explore the currently available release and comment on the forums about your experiences, good or bad! Happy hunting!

After spending the last week or so chasing this bug with singleminded abandon, and with the help of data obtained through feedback from the community I have finally identified the cause of the Vector Crash bug. The fix took less than ten minutes to implement and the engine's footprint has now been substantially reduced. The memory leak is gone and with that solved, the Vector Crash bug seems to have been squashed. I have posted a patch on the Downloads page that addresses this issue. Just replace the old executable with the new one and you're good to go.

It was indeed the line of sight routine that was causing the memory leak. Using good programming practice I had been freeing up memory by deleting vectors once I was done calculating with them. Unfortunately it appears the compiler does not handle vector deletion very efficiently; once it has output machine code the resulting executable does not, in fact, free up all the memory a vector had been using when it deletes the vector, resulting in the memory leak. I resolved this by biting the bullet and creating all the vectors just once, at the beginning of execution, and never deleting or recreating them thereafter. This probably classifies as poor memory management but there seems no other way around it. With this fix implemented, the engine's memory footprint now holds at a steady 103MB on my system and never fluctuates by more than 20 bytes per minute. The engine can now (theoretically) run for months before it will eat the last byte of memory.

Incidentally, I can't explain those 20 bytes per minute that are still eaten by the engine. Though such a small amount of memory is entirely inconsequential and does not need to be 'fixed', I can't help but wonder...

On a future development note, I have begun drawing up plans for a multiplayer mode. This is still a long way off, so don't expect it to be implemented until the rest of the engine is complete, but it's on the table. Meanwhile, I am continuing work on the Artificial Intelligence (mostly for CPU Marine players at the moment, but Alien AI will come in time) and on the user interface for the Aliens team to allow them to be used properly by the player. Junkers (our Art Lead) is in the middle of a relocation from Sydney to Melbourne where he is setting up his new home, so work on the tileset and other graphics is temporarily on hold until he can get himself set up.

More comments soon!

Feedback is sought in relation to the nasty 'Vector Crash' bug that has been plaguing development for a few days. The bug is related to line of sight calculation and is believed to occur when a unit tries to determine whether it can see the thing it trying to shoot before firing a round. It appears to be a memory allocation problem and only seems to happen when the system has little physical memory remaining. The Starstrike engine is not optimised for memory usage at this stage and will use increasing amounts of memory during play (especially during heavy combat) without optimising memory allocation (this takes a lot of work on the part of programmers, but is on the to-do list), ultimately using up all available system memory (as most games do). It appears that when a vector calculation is made in relation to firing line of sight and there is no available memory left to put the result, the game will fatally crash with a Vector Does Not Exist error.

Just to keep life interesting, it also seems that switching out of the game and back in (using Alt-Tab) creates a possibility of an instantaneous Vector Crash at the instant the game is switched back in.

The latest build of the game features a simple memory monitor in the topleft corner of the game screen. Alpha testers are encouraged to download the latest build and play the game, keeping an eye on the memory monitor. If and when a Vector Crash occurs, we need to know how much physical memory you had remaining at that time. If at any time other than low memory you experience a Vector Crash, we need to know how much memory you had left at the time as well as any other details that might be relevant, such as how frequently you switched the game out and back in that session and what was happening ingame at the time. Virtual Memory information would also be of use (page file size, etc).

The more feedback we receive from testers, the more information we will have to help us squash this bug. A thread has been set up on the forums for feedback in relation to the Vector Crash bug. Please post any information or comments to this thread.

Welcome to the first Developer Blog post. I have just launched the website and the first semipublic Alpha build is up and running on the site. You can check it out at the Downloads section.

Because this is the first Alpha to be released, I will discuss what has been developed up to this point:

• Fully scrollable, 2D tilebased map system capable of handling immense playfields (for perspective, the test map featured in this release is 64x64 in dimension; maximum mapsize is 512x512 - takes several minutes for a Marine to walk from one side to the other!)
• Efficient, easy to use map editor package that exports maps the engine can efficiently import. (Not for public release)
• Partially completed metallic tileset, used in demonstration maps.
• Radar system to keep track of friendly and enemy stuctures, units and resources.
• Functional resource model.
• Unit movement and rudimentary pathing algorithms (these need to be replaced down the track).
• Sophisticated UI system for handling construction, research, and equipment and supply drops.
• Combat, projectile, explosion, health, ammo and flexible visual effect systems.
• Placeholder art used for units and structures pending recruitment of animation artist (see the Recruitment Notice if you can help!).
• Directional sound and music system.
• Marine content completed - all unit types, equipment, structures and research system completed.
• Most Alien content completed - all unit types and structures completed. Yet to implement a UI to allow a human player to use them properly.
• Artificial Intelligence - only a rudimentary system has been implemented at this stage. The CPU will not build new structures, drop equipment, research new tech or evolve higher lifeforms, traits or abilities yet, but he will send out attacks against you and resupply his troops with medpacks and ammopacks as needed. Enough to try out the game against an enemy that will fight back. He will still provide you a challenge until you tech up and get strong defenses in place, and even then he will work on eroding them and you will have to maintain your defensive line or he will eventually break through. He's especially dangerous on the Duel map!

Currently under development is a more advanced Artificial Intelligence and a UI for the Alien race to enable their play, as well as more work on the metallic tileset being used at the moment.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Welcome to the Developer Blog! From time to time a member of the DevTeam (most frequently Agent, Lead Programmer and Team Leader) will post a diary entry here relating to the trials and tribulations of developing a software title. Games development is a particularly interesting and difficult industry; there should always be something of interest here! Comments on any entry are invited; just post on the forums if you have something to say!

From time to time our software will develop abnormal behaviour that cannot be explained. Our programmers tend to lose entire tufts of hair when this happens until the bug is identified and squashed. Sometimes this is not an easy task, and we need information from our testing community to aid us in our efforts. When this happens, an entry will appear here and a post will appear on the forums in relation to the bug, containing information regarding the bug and what we need people to do to help us out. If you feel like helping, collect the information we've asked for and make a post on the relevant forum thread. We will gather the feedback offered by the community and use it to make Starstrike a better game!

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