Comments, suggestions, ...

[Zogu]

Hi! I very much enjoy the game. I play daily, it's a good way of "venting out" stress. Here are a few comments and suggestions.

1. The game's icon is very bland and gray and dull looking. I'd prefer a Zorg head. Please please please!

2. Why is the game launcher screen in 16 colors and badly dithered? I understand that people have artistic feelings, but I really don't like it.

3. It would be cool to add an organic race. That race would have its own exotic weapons and systems, that can't be used by other races... unless you equip your ship with a "bio-electric interface" item. Some of their weapons would actually plague your ship well past combat (hull-wreaking parasites, slow-down slime, mind control that induces erratic behavior in the crew).

4. The game uses 100% of my CPU. I have a 2 ghz Pentium 4 with 512 mb memory and a good vid card.

5. How about having the game connecting to a server to search for updates, patches and mods? Numerous games use that proactive way (for instance, "Lux").

[Shadowcat]

Zogu said:
1. The game's icon is very bland and gray and dull looking. I'd prefer a Zorg head. Please please please!

I agree about ther icon (a little less so when large, but I never see it at that size). The Zorg head is already used for the SAIS icon though, so it would cause confusion to reuse that.

2. Why is the game launcher screen in 16 colors and badly dithered? I understand that people have artistic feelings, but I really don't like it.

It's 256 colours, actually, and this will doubtless be because they need to allow for people having their desktop set to 256 colours.

3. It would be cool to add an organic race.

Check out the modding scene, and give it a bash.

[Zogu]

Anybody out there still using 256 colors???

[Fingers]

The launcher is in 256 colors mainly to save some spacetime. Incidentally it also makes it easy to use the mod selector banners on the web (as .gif) so modmakers will only need to make one banner for their mod.

[Zogu]

Thanks for the explanation. Sometimes I like asking questions because, you know, I want to understand things! lol.

[Spaceman]

Very thoughtful of you. However, it could be argued that this might result in an increase in spacetime occupied if it enhances the user's experience.

[Shadowcat]

The launcher is in 256 colors mainly to save some spacetime. Incidentally it also makes it easy to use the mod selector banners on the web (as .gif) so modmakers will only need to make one banner for their mod.

I'm awfully surprised to read that. It is more time consuming to deal with custom 8-bit palettes than it is to simply work in 24-bit colour; the web has not been an 8-bit landscape for many many years (colour jpegs); and the extra space taken by a 24-bit banner is negligable, IMO.

If that's really the reason, I'd quite like to see it patched to utilise 24-bit colour before people start completing mods.

[Fingers]

However there is a definite difference between writing 24-bit software graphics code from scratch and using 8-bit code you already have. That's the "time" part of spacetime.

[Pfhoenix]

Doesn't SDL have methods for loading 24bit images from file? I've used SDL before (an old version, even), and I don't recall ever being limited to 8bit palettized textures. If not, there is an SDLImage lib, if I remember the name correctly.

I agree with Shadowcat here; I can't think of a single reason to not be using 24/32bit images for everything (well, I suppose to avoid loading 300MB of textures to the video card, but if you aren't really hurting on texture memory usage, this isn't an issue).

[Shadowcat]

Fingers: Oh I see! A slight misinterpretation there on my part.

From the outside it does seem like something that shouldn't be a major hassle to change, but I realise that's easy to say when you don't have to write the code.

If you get the time to change it, it sure would be nice. Not really a priority, though.