All Posts by Drafell

I think these pictures will speak for themselves.

Big, phallic, armored spaceships...

Kind of like DarkSpace, although for simplicity and ease of learning we handle combat on a 2d plane.

It is pretty much entirely skill based, as in personal skill.

As Posted in the DS forums:

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The Bifrost Fleet Foundry proudly presents the "Odysseus", the latest in their line of interstellar capable rapid transport vessels.

Measured at 85.3 meters in length, 28.7 meters across the beam and with a draft of 18.7 meters, it is the largest ship of it's kind.

The Odysseus project was originally commissioned by the UGTO Senate just after the Sirius incident. A need was identified for a fast and heavily armored RTV for diplomatic purposes. And so, six years later and after much political wrangling over contracts and designs, the first Odysseus class transport left the Bifrost Shipyard construction facilities.

The Odysseus is designed to support 5 crew members and 15 passengers, and features two 270 degree Standard chemical lasers for point defense. In contrast to other, similar class transports, the Odysseus sacrifices space normally used for sensory subsystems for additional armoring instead, giving it far superior hull integrity than even the front line ST-0x series scout ships.

The first Odysseus off the production line has been dedicated exclusively for the use of Grand Chancellor Mato and his deputy, Vice Chancellor Kitashiro. They will be formally presented with the ship at a naming ceremony later this week.

The BFF has already received orders for over 200 of these new vessels from various planetary governors and other well known corporate CEO's, which secures the future of the company for the next 2 years.

Comments and Feedback

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Note: This is my first official ship design, and it consists of a total of 470 polygons and was created using 3DS Max R5. I am NOT a professional 3d artist, and was working on a very tight polygon budget in order to meet system compatibility requirements.

I hope you all like it.

P.S. The DarkSpace team are always on the lookout for people who can create good quality 3d meshes and for people who are good at skinning models as well. We are receptive to community assistance in the development process, and although we cannot offer kind of formal reward, it is a good opportunity for budding designers to get their work published in an existing game, and due credit will be given where such assistance is offered.

Naturally there are no guarantees that anything submitted will be used. It is entirely up to the development team to approve any such efforts.

There are supposed to be a lot of games like that in development, but you might be thinking Infinity...

Escapism.

The Palestar servers are back up now and were only down for just short of 30 minutes.

Again, apologies for the downtime.

It really depends on what your game is about, where the core focus lies and the balance concepts involved. It is workable, and can be fun, but will not suit most conventional style MMO's.

The Palestar network crashed today at 1pm CST (7pm GMT) for an as-yet unknown reason.

Hopefully we should be able to get the web and game servers running again ASAP.

Sorry for the downtime.

That's kind of the way DarkSpace works. When you initially start the game it is a limiting factor, but it's really not important to the game itself. In fact, most of the community will quite happily give newbies more than enough money than they will ever need.

In the next version of the game we are reducing the reliance even further via a simple swap system. This will reduce the learning curve drastically, and destroyed ships will automatically be salvaged and merely require repair (which is free but takes some time) before they can be used again.
The finalized system will be slightly more complex and I cannot reveal too many details on it currently, but the focus is on having fun, not spending most of your game time farming just to pay for a single battle.

For those interested, I recently did a short experiment on MMORPG.com that in a way relates to this thread.

You can see the early results posted on my blog here.

To expand on it slightly:- Over the following 7 days, I received only 57 hits with no active posting (IE relying purely on existing forum posts).

I think I have only posted another 7 or 8 times since then, and the running total since the beginning of the experiment stands at at 462 hits.

It may not sound like much, but I found the results quite interesting myself.

There is really not anything available that can offer everything you are looking for in a single package and that you haven't played already.

DarkSpace! Yay!

It's not for everyone, but no information is required for users to take advantage of the demo mode/trial coupon other than a valid email address.

There is more information available in this thread.

Personally I find it more effective to openly admit who you are, not that I currently get any form of reward other than seeing a great game continue to exist and grow, and knowing I am part of the reason for it doing so.

Viral marketing itself is a growing phenomena, or more correctly, it is finally getting the public awareness and exposure that it deserves. It has existed in various media forms for decades.

Community Liaison/Public Relations is one of my roles, although I don't pretend to be a professional, so I end up dealing with and co-ordinating most of the PR. I kind of fell into the role as no one else seemed to be doing it.

Most of my experience has been in the retail sector, and I enjoy the challenge that is presented by this.

Getting noticed is always an issue for any independent developer or publisher. Unfortunately when you are in a market saturated by commercially backed companies/publishers and large budgets it can be a struggle to get your voice heard. Take a look at the front page for this site, 1/5th - 1/4 of the screen real estate is devoted to paid advertising. MMORPG.com is one of the few sites that will actually post news submissions when we mail them. Quite a few competitors will blankly ignore submitted releases, simply because the game in question does not (in their consideration) have a big enough audience to warrant it taking that space - unless of course, you pay, in which case you can get those front page 'features'. I won't name the sites, but I do know this from personal experience in dealing with them.

As for new features planned, I try to keep this site updated at least, although I am not a believer in false PR just for the sake of it. Constantly rewording and rehashing the same news time and time again is not 'good PR', and personally it's something that a find very annoying when I see it done. If you look through the others threads here in the DarkSpace section you will find all that information as it is.

Dev Profiles are a good idea to consider, I will take that into consideration, although I would like to actually develop something solid and have some things to show before I do anything like that.

I do have a few models I am currently working on (although again I am no professional so it takes time). When I have the finished articles ready I will post them.

Anyway, thank you for your feedback. It is much appreciated and I hope you do, at least, give the game a try. It may be quite old, and it has it's share of issues, but the core game is solid and quite fun.

-Draf.

Accounts are purged routinely as part of the server and database maintenance systems, but that still leaves us with 57622 active registrations. Of those a reasonable retention ratio to expect from people who create accounts is about 1%, given that we aren't actively promoting the current game version, so that would equate to around 570 active players. In any retail environment thats actually a reasonable a good figure. With aggressive promotions we could expect closer to a 3-5% retention ratio, but that is being reserved until we have a version we have a high level of confidence in promoting in such a fashion.

The current version isn't bad and it is perfectly playable, but there are many ways it can be improved, and so we want to reserve the advertising budget until we have a product we can promote with the high level of confidence it deserves. Pushing for a lot of media attention on the current version would be a big mistake, as there are a few relatively minor issues with it that would quite honestly get slammed in review sand we are well aware of those weaknesses. This is not the kind of mistake we can afford to make. Until then it is still important for us to maintain a reasonable media profile, as being totally off the radar would be a lot worse for us than maintaining the status quo.

Getting 140,000 people to take in interest in the game and try it out it still quite an achievement and, in my view, something for us (and the community) to be proud of.

We haven't made any empty promises to the Community or player base. In fact, we try to be quite open and honest about the situation of the game.

The subscription fee just about covers the cost of running the game servers and the maintenance of the hardware. So long as that continues, the game will stay live. Palestar does not currently make a profit from DS, and none of the staff are paid. It relies entirely on volunteer staff to keep it running and for the development.

The current situation is that none of us can spend the time we would like to in developing the game. Since I became a developer in the middle of last year, I have done what I can to try to improve the playability of the current version, but we are severely limited as many of the issues that really needs solving are hard coded into the game and I can only currently make changes via the live scripting engine.

I do have access to the source code for the beta engine, but I am currently waiting on the lead programmer to finish some changes in the server and network coding. Unfortunately this process also locks the development team out of introducing new game assets, such as models and visual/audio effects as the way these items are being handled by the game engine is being optimized as part of these aforementioned change. It's very unwise to try and add new assets while this process is ongoing as we need to resolve any existing bugs first before we start introducing new ones.

It has taken a long time so far, and Richard (the lead programmer/owner) has a full time job and family commitments which must, as a necessity, come as a priority. He is also the only current developer who has the necessary skills to do the required core network coding and server implementation.

If we could hurry up work, we would. If we had enough people with the necessary skills to program the new version, we could no doubt get it done quickly. Unfortunately this is not the situation and quite frankly we just do not have the necessary funding to be able to hire those people. As you might understand, there are various IP issues involved, and thus Palestar are quite rightly very wary about just which volunteers are given access to the source materials for the game development. People wishing to help out have to prove a certain level of ability and understand of the development process and how to manage or administer assets and they also have to prove that they can be trusted.

For the above reasons we have always been clear that we cannot set a timetable on version 1.484, and that those who choose to subscribe support the current game version and keep the servers running.

Providing DarkSpace itself continues to run, we will work on developing and improving it where we can. If we do have to shut the game down then in all probability there won't be a next version, and thats a loss for everyone into gaming, as DarkSpace does offer game-play action and concepts that you simply won't find anywhere else.

We know it is frustrating waiting, and we wish things could be different. However, this is not the case, and there is only so much we can do.

Please bear with us. And thank you to everyone who has supported the game during this time and to everyone who continues to support us.

GuildWars has and excellently balanced PvP system. It is not perfect, but player skill does play a significant role.

EvE suffers from the whole 'gear' issue which the OP mentions, so I don't think it is a great contender in terms of PvP balance.

My personal favourite, of course, has to be DarkSpace...

I think both the PvP and the skill system are horrendously imbalanced. PvP requires too much 'downtime' to maintain, IE you have to dedicate a lot of time to maintaining your income to keep paying for ships.

The skill system makes a reasonable kind of sense for the acquired trade skills and other management based skills, but anything that affects your competitiveness in combat should not be included. The two tiered skill + equipment system inherently balances this in favour of the oldest players regardless or personal piloting skill.

First one would have to be GuildWars and winning 10 consecutive Guild Battles shortly after the game released with GWOnline.

The second was learning how NOT to die in DarkSpace. I remember it was around August 2003, I had been trying to fly my Carrier Dreadnought and was being reasonable successful but had seemed to hit a wall in my playing skill. No matter how hard I tried I just seemed to be unable to gain any more prestige (the DarkSpace equivalent of experience). DarkSpace is almost totally a PvP twitch-based game, and I was continually getting trounced on by the 1+ year 'veterans', but was still having a lot of fun.
Out of desperation, and to avoid losing more prestige, I resorted to piloting as smaller ship, called the Assault Destroyer. I was still dieing lots, but I was slowly starting to gain prestige again.

About a week later it suddenly hit me like a revelation. I seemed to enter this zone where I simply could not die. Instead of going into battle and having a 50/50 chance of survival, I had this seemingly magical ability to dodge the incoming enemy fire, while dealing a good lot of damage in return. For about 7 hours solid I played and did not die once, and I realized that I had gone from being a merely average player, to a somewhat decent pilot. No longer would I have to fear the veterans, for I had joined their ranks at last. I had not become one of the elite, for there were only a few such pilot's with the god like ability to take on whole fleets and win, and I still would not consider myself to be one of these few individuals today. But... that probably has to be one of my greatest gaming moments ever.

During this time I had joined a fleet(the DS version of a guild or clan) called the Shattered Star Confederation, or =SSC= for short. I became an influential member of the DarkSpace division and pretty much ended up running it by the end of the year. Unfortunately nearly the entire SSC collapsed a couple of years ago due to internal 'leadership' issues, which in itself was a conflict with the entire set of ideals the clan embodied. I decided to leave and found my own fleet, which has been around in variously named incarnations ever since. SSC itself split in to two new clans, The SSX, or Shattered Star Exiles, which are still around as a community today, and the original SSC, which I believe has dissolved into somewhat of a non-entity.

It was a couple of months after my 'revelation' that I got invited to apply for a GM position for DarkSpace, and in July of last year I joined the development team.

There, I ended up telling more than I originally intended to...

We have three main 'game' servers. The newbie.darkspace.net, and admiral.darkspace.net servers are intended for people new to the game and to help them learn how the game-play works. These are both non-persistent scenario servers. When a team 'wins' a map, it progresses to the next map/scenario which is dependent on the outcome of the previous one. I would recommend playing on these until you are more familiar with the game play and at least have access to a destroyer class ship. You will find it is much easier to earn you first few ranks in these servers, and you also get to learn about how to build up and fortify planets.

The third server, metaverse.darkspace.net is our persistent world server. This is where the three main factions fight it out for control of the explored galaxy, which is otherwise known as "The Human Quadrant". Here you will find random events, which include AI invasion fleets, planetary revolts and occasionally some other interesting occurrences such as solar flares destroying all established planetary installations.

I hope this helps a little.