New Utopia / News: Recent posts

OK, it's been 6 months and you haven't heard a peep from me and no new releases. I am still working on the game, although mostly only on the weekends and not very much then.
I am going to complete the game, but it doesn't have the priority that it used to.
The current state of development is that I have added weather and pirate entities. I still need to code the interactions, but right now I am chasing down yet another memory bug. I will strive to get something added to CVS once it's stable.

This is an incremental update to the previous version. Two new features have been added: moving schools of fish and boats can now be given movement orders and they will goto their destination.

Version 0.1.0 is now available. Although it is not much different from the previous release, it is considered the first alpha release since is is now a 'playable' game.
There is not much to do except build buildings and
watch your score and gold change each turn. Any follow up alpha releases will probably just be code fixes without any new features.
My efforts will be directed towards the beta release, which include boats and weather and interactions between them.

Work on the project has been continuing since the last update. It seemed silly to post update after update of 'still working...'. Now that my life has settled down and I am working again, I should be able to progress in a more regular fashion.

Still no Alpha release, although I have made major progress on the game. Some of the work I have done the past 6 months won't appear until the beta release. I have compiled a list of Alpha release requirements and am working to complete those.... read more

I decided to move the regular biweekly status reports to the forums and use the news page only for items of significance.
So go check it out.

Progress on the project has been slow. The end of the semester is taking more time than I anticipated. I've added some more error checking/logging and some miscellanous code, but there is still no playable game.

The only noticable difference is version 0.0.4 has a better test map. I've added a source file download as well so that anyone who wants to can download the source. There is a Visual C++ project file in the zip download to build the game.... read more

I finally got my first response to someone else trying the game--and it crashed and burned on them at start up. I have some ideas why that might had happened and will recode however much is necessary to insure that the game will work on most people's machines and at least give an error message for the machines that it won't work on.
There have been a small number of downloads for this project and I can't believe all of them ran sucessfully. PLEASE email me or submit a bug report if you have problems with the program. There is a readme file included in the zip--please read at least the top of it. DirectX 8.1 is required for this program.... read more

It's been a week since I started the alpha release project and finally there is something to download!

The player manual is in a more or less complete state for the alpha release. I'm sure there will be additional corrections/additions to it.

The design doc still needs quite abit more work, but there is some good information on there. Not sure if anyone really would be interested in reading it, but why not put it out there.... read more

I had been playing with the idea of doing an initial version of this program in Java since I am currently studying for the Java certification exam, but after reviewing the Java2D API, I decided that there were too many drawbacks to doing that.
So work has finally started on this project. I am taking 14 credit hours this fall, all in computer classes, so my time is limited. I have set up a series of tasks that will lead to an Alpha release hopefully by mid November, whch should leave me some time to study for Finals and the Java certification test in December.
Of course after that Master of Orion 3 will be out and it's difficult to say if I've have any time at all for awhile. I will leave weekly updates on the status of the project.