Just over a year ago I did a post on Star Frontiers related software projects I was involved with. This one is an update. Expect to see more frequent postings on this topic in the future as things progress. This is where I'm spending a lot of my free time at the moment.
The Orbiter project has been shelved indefinitely at this point but the others are still going strong. Art and I have moved on to other areas that are slightly more fertile at the moment.
The KH Vector and Star Frontiers RPG game have been merged into a single project by Art Eaton who is doing that work. You can find details about the two projects over at the starfrontiers.org site.
My project, the Second Sathar War Game, has been moving along nicely, especially since February when I started my new job out in California. I'm up to release 0.0.10 and it now is a fully playable (although limited) game. You can read the full details under the Release Announcement section of the forums but the strategic game is almost fully implemented and a basic combat system for the tactical game is in place.
Over the next few months I'll be cleaning up the code and fleshing out the combat system. Stay tuned for updates. In the mean time, jump over to the site and download the game and take it for a spin. It runs on both Windows and Linux. I'd have a Mac version but I don't own a Mac to build it on.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
New Online Campaigns
So I was looking over the list of on-line campaigns that I had posted previously (over a year ago now) and realized there were a few new ones I should mention. One, which I'm running I announced earlier as well. Since that time there have been a few additional campaigns start up:
- Second Sathar War Boardgame Campaign - I'm running this one as well. In this game we're playing out the Second Sathar War game from the back of the Knight Hawks Campaign book.
- Wing Commander - In this campaign players are rookie fighter pilots just completing their initial training and heading off to their first duty assignments. It's run by Shadow Shack.
- Wing Commander: Dominion - This is a campaign similar to the Wing Command game but here the player's are the bad guys, junior fighter pilot trainees for an evil dictator ship that has take over the Frontier. Also run by Shadow Shack and host on the same site as the Dominion campaign.
- Black Hand Gang spinoff campaign - This one was just announced today and doesn't even have an official separate name. CaptainH, who runs the Black Hand Gang campaign is spinning off another campaign from the main game and is looking for players. In his own words "I have decided to run another storyline in this same universe that is currently centring around the establishment of a Zoo/Nature Reserve on Volturnus and I am looking for players that might be interested in joining this adventure/campaign.
This particular PBEM adventure will not be hugely demanding on time for players, probably weekly or even fortnightly turn arounds.
Whilst there is room for players with Military skills, I am primarily looking for SF gamers who are keen to run Tech and Science based characters. Environmentalists are highly sought after for this scenario.
Players may create new characters for this adventure or you may adopt one of several 'orphaned' NPC's." The link in the bullet title goes to the sign up page.
New Job
Normally, I don't intend to post about my personal life here but this does have a bit to do with my involvement with Star Frontiers so it counts.
I work for NASA as a contractor. Back in February, I changed projects moving from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission to the SOFIA project. So now instead of working out of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland (where I was telecommuting to work from Utah), I'm working out of Ames Research Center near San Jose, California.
My new job requires me to be on-site during the work week and for various reasons my family is still in Utah. So I commute each week, flying out to California on Monday morning and home to Utah Friday evenings.
What does this have to do with Star Frontiers? Well, during the work week, when I'm not home in Utah, I have lots of free time in the evening in my little studio apartment in Sunnyvale. Without the kids to distract, I have lots of time to spend on my favorite hobby, Star Frontiers. Expect to see rapid progress (some of which has already occurred) on my computer game and activity on my online campaigns.
I work for NASA as a contractor. Back in February, I changed projects moving from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission to the SOFIA project. So now instead of working out of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland (where I was telecommuting to work from Utah), I'm working out of Ames Research Center near San Jose, California.
My new job requires me to be on-site during the work week and for various reasons my family is still in Utah. So I commute each week, flying out to California on Monday morning and home to Utah Friday evenings.
What does this have to do with Star Frontiers? Well, during the work week, when I'm not home in Utah, I have lots of free time in the evening in my little studio apartment in Sunnyvale. Without the kids to distract, I have lots of time to spend on my favorite hobby, Star Frontiers. Expect to see rapid progress (some of which has already occurred) on my computer game and activity on my online campaigns.
Site Management
Okay, this is going to be the first of a few short posts about things that have been going on (in no particular order) over the last ten months.
One major event is that I've given up hope of acquiring the starfrontiers.net domain. I've repeatedly attempted to contact the owner of the domain with offers to buy the domain from him but have never gotten a response. Even though his site has no content and hasn't changed since 2000, he continues to renew the domain every April. Maybe the e-mail address listed for him (martin at brenner.de) just goes to a dead inbox, I don't know but he has never responed to a single e-mail I sent him.
I did pick up the starfrontiers.info domain late last year from Larry Moore a few months after he dropped it. It's almost as good a domain for the Star Frontiers Network as starfrontiers.net. Maybe I'll just change the name of the site to the Star Frontiers Information Network and then it would be a perfect fit!
In any case, effective about a month ago, May 1st, 2009, the Star Frontiers Network moved to a home at www.starfrontiers.info. Drop on by and visit. Also, if you have links to the the old starfrontiers.homelinux.net domain, while it is still active and points to the site as well, I recommend you update your bookmarks and links. I'd like to channel all my pagerank and other search karma at the new domain.
I expect this will be the permanent home for the site. If for some reason, Martin finally responds and I can get the .net domain, the site will move one last time. But I'm not holding my breath.
One major event is that I've given up hope of acquiring the starfrontiers.net domain. I've repeatedly attempted to contact the owner of the domain with offers to buy the domain from him but have never gotten a response. Even though his site has no content and hasn't changed since 2000, he continues to renew the domain every April. Maybe the e-mail address listed for him (martin at brenner.de) just goes to a dead inbox, I don't know but he has never responed to a single e-mail I sent him.
I did pick up the starfrontiers.info domain late last year from Larry Moore a few months after he dropped it. It's almost as good a domain for the Star Frontiers Network as starfrontiers.net. Maybe I'll just change the name of the site to the Star Frontiers Information Network and then it would be a perfect fit!
In any case, effective about a month ago, May 1st, 2009, the Star Frontiers Network moved to a home at www.starfrontiers.info. Drop on by and visit. Also, if you have links to the the old starfrontiers.homelinux.net domain, while it is still active and points to the site as well, I recommend you update your bookmarks and links. I'd like to channel all my pagerank and other search karma at the new domain.
I expect this will be the permanent home for the site. If for some reason, Martin finally responds and I can get the .net domain, the site will move one last time. But I'm not holding my breath.
I'm Not Dead Yet... I'm Getting Better.
10 Months since my last post, I've got to get better. Blogging is just low down on my list of things to do. Anyway, here to writing more often.
It's not like there hasn't been anything going on. There are several things to talk about and they will be coming in some short posts over the next few days. However to give a quick run down:
It's not like there hasn't been anything going on. There are several things to talk about and they will be coming in some short posts over the next few days. However to give a quick run down:
- Most, if not all, of the games I mentioned in one of my earlier posts are still going, if not strong and a few new ones have started up.
- My computer game has been slowly coming along and is in a playable state.
- My site, The Star Frontiers Network, has moved to a new, permanent domain.
- I've moved to a new job.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Star Frontiers Network Site Moved To Its Intended Home
Well, I finally got the Star Frontiers Network site moved to it's permanent home. It only took a month longer than planned due to repeated hardware failure.
I got the pieces to build a new computer at the end of June (it was my Father's Day present) that was going to host the site but the motherboard kept dying. After I got the pieces I set it up and started up stress test to "burn in" the components and make sure they were working properly. Well, it literally burned the motherboard, frying a capacitor. The weird thing was that it ran just fine for 24 hours without a problem. It was when I turned it off and rebooted that the capacitor fried. So that caused a two week delay as I had to send it in an get it repaired/replaced.
Once the mobo came back I hooked it all up again and fired it up (again literally). This time it didn't even last a day. While testing it out the computer locked up and refused to POST. Both times there was the smell of burning silicon. The first time I had the case open and actually saw the capacitor burn out. The second time there was no obvious sign of damage. Again, the mobo went back to the manufacturer.
This time I know they sent me a completely different motherboard as it was blue instead of green like the original. That was Thursday of last week and I haven't had any problems at all. So today I moved the site over. For those that are interested, here are the specs on the new box:
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-SA (rev 1.0) BIOS v F5
AMD Phenom x4 9850BE (quad core 2.5GHz)
4 GB Patriot Exterme PC6400 DDR2 RAM
500 GB SATA HD
Sony DVD+/-RW drive
Integrated graphics
The computer is my and my wife's main home computer and so is running WinXP. The site itself is running on Scientific Linux 5 (a Redhat Enterprise Linux knockoff) in a VMWare virtual machine. The VM currently has 512MB RAM and 2 CPU's which is more than enough to run the web server. Until I moved it, it was running on a Intel Core Duo (2GHz) system and only had 256 MB RAM and 1 CPU and had no troubles. The new setup makes it a bit snappier. If traffic and load ever become an issue I can always add more RAM to the VM or eventually move it to a dedicated box. (If only I could be so lucky to get that much traffic.)
The site is doing fine. The Obar Enterprises game is in full swing with seven players and Shadow Shack is starting up a new game called Wing Commander where the players are star fighter pilots, or as he describes it in the forum description, "Welcome to Top Gun, Knight Hawks style!". So come on over and join in the fun or just follow along.
I got the pieces to build a new computer at the end of June (it was my Father's Day present) that was going to host the site but the motherboard kept dying. After I got the pieces I set it up and started up stress test to "burn in" the components and make sure they were working properly. Well, it literally burned the motherboard, frying a capacitor. The weird thing was that it ran just fine for 24 hours without a problem. It was when I turned it off and rebooted that the capacitor fried. So that caused a two week delay as I had to send it in an get it repaired/replaced.
Once the mobo came back I hooked it all up again and fired it up (again literally). This time it didn't even last a day. While testing it out the computer locked up and refused to POST. Both times there was the smell of burning silicon. The first time I had the case open and actually saw the capacitor burn out. The second time there was no obvious sign of damage. Again, the mobo went back to the manufacturer.
This time I know they sent me a completely different motherboard as it was blue instead of green like the original. That was Thursday of last week and I haven't had any problems at all. So today I moved the site over. For those that are interested, here are the specs on the new box:
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-SA (rev 1.0) BIOS v F5
AMD Phenom x4 9850BE (quad core 2.5GHz)
4 GB Patriot Exterme PC6400 DDR2 RAM
500 GB SATA HD
Sony DVD+/-RW drive
Integrated graphics
The computer is my and my wife's main home computer and so is running WinXP. The site itself is running on Scientific Linux 5 (a Redhat Enterprise Linux knockoff) in a VMWare virtual machine. The VM currently has 512MB RAM and 2 CPU's which is more than enough to run the web server. Until I moved it, it was running on a Intel Core Duo (2GHz) system and only had 256 MB RAM and 1 CPU and had no troubles. The new setup makes it a bit snappier. If traffic and load ever become an issue I can always add more RAM to the VM or eventually move it to a dedicated box. (If only I could be so lucky to get that much traffic.)
The site is doing fine. The Obar Enterprises game is in full swing with seven players and Shadow Shack is starting up a new game called Wing Commander where the players are star fighter pilots, or as he describes it in the forum description, "Welcome to Top Gun, Knight Hawks style!". So come on over and join in the fun or just follow along.
Friday, July 4, 2008
New Online Campaign
Well, now that the Star Frontiers Network web site is officially up, it's time to get my new campaign going. It will be run as a Play By Post style game on the gaming forums on the new site. The title of the campaign is Obar Enterprises. The PC's will be an elite troubleshooting team working for Obar Enterprises, a small independent merchant company with a lot of contacts and a lot of resources. You can follow this link directly to the Obar Enterprises game forum or click through from the main forums page. We've got two players so far and are looking for a total of four to eight so if you're interested in playing along drop on over and check it out.
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