Stellar Frontier
Monday, August 29th, 2005Andy came over to play some games this weekend, we we ended up going
through our usual lineup. Actually, the lineup has pretty much been the
same for the last three years:
- Warcraft of some sort We play Stratagus now
- Battlefield 1942 - Battlefield 2 just doesn’t compare to the original in the series.
- Stellar Frontier - Read on
Stellar Frontier is a game we discovered back in 2002 when we were looking for a good modern replacement for Netrek that had some decent bots. Stellar Frontier was definitely this game. Great multiplayer play and great bot play mixed together perfectly.
The worst problem with the game is that it performed horribly on my
Athlon 1700 XP with 512 MB of RAM. As far as we could tell, it didn’t
use any hardware acceleration whatsoever, and the only way to make it
playable in 64-player games was to set your color depth to
8-bits-per-pixel. Now, I’ve got a P4 3.0GHZ on which it seems to run
better, but it shouldn’t take that much of a computer, considering that
netrek ran fine on my Win95 box.
The next worst problem was the game getting out of sync. We’re talking Duke Nukem 3D
bad. Even when I’m running on my own box, I get out of sync sometimes
and need to refresh the game. Intelligently enough, the game provides a
key to resync the game which I hit about once a mintute. I think they
would have made it a lot more reliable by using Completion Ports or
some other reliable form of Async IO.
Anyway, we’re hoping that they’ll Open Source the game someday so we can fix the graphics and networking code (and unlock the register-only weapons). In the mean-time, you can visit Stellar Frontier’s homepage at http://www.stardock.net/products/sf.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:32 am
The source code has been released for public share, the old community is holding a baord where you can discuss development on the website posted