Yeah,  I think players now expect it.   Adding it isn't so difficult, the problem is deciding how it should be added I guess.   

In combat, would that be cool to have your ship rotate and move towards the mouse pointer? 

Hi, I'm a making a SC tribute game.  The original star controls only had keyboard input.  How important is mouse use to this style of gaming nowadays?

I actually tried blender first.  However, I found out that it only load certain types of .3ds files.  So then I found another program that some people on gamedev.net thought would work called gmax.  It also couldn't load those files.  So most people there thought that the only way was to find someone that had 3d studio max and have them convert them to a more readable format.

Dragon asked for some jpgs of my models and maybe a zip file...  I think I can do that for you sometime.  Mine aren't as nice as dragons, but they should all load with free software.

Hey I was looking at the models page and noticed that Dragon had posted a bunch of his models .  Unfortunately they were all in .max format.  I haven't been able to find the right stuff to be able to load them.  Searching on the net, it seems the best thing to do would be to use 3d studio max to convert them to a .obj format or a .3ds format.  Unfortunately, I don't have thousands of dollars to buy 3d studio max.

Can anyone help me out here?  I was hoping to try his models out a bit (seeing as they looked much nicer than mine).

Ah man.  I really wish this story would go quicker.  Its so well done, and the art is amazing.  I hope he publishes, this would sell.

My game that I was making was based entirely on having multiple ships in combat.

The AI is more difficult.. But the statement that the ships are designed in such a way as to only allow 1v1 combat isn't true.

The trick with the AI is to have the ship select targets.  As a target ship goes out of range or another more dangerous ship comes into range the AI needs to be able to switch targets.

Also to make the game a little more exciting I've added moving space mines and space turrets.

A couple things that have confused me:
1. sound fx.  if there's 30 ships all firing, being hit, being killed.  How do you manage soundFX?  It just gets crazy if you try to play everything.

Lukipedia sent me an email a while ago asking about models.  So I replied to him, but I thought there may be others that want my models.

Here they all are, they are open source, and you can redistribute and change them any way you want.  They are also low poly, and for the most part pixel colored instead of textured.  I did this because I want to have massive amounts of ships on screen at a time in my game.  Also because, the texturing tools I found were too time consuming and painful to use... Perhaps I'll design something myself sometime.  ***dreaming of having unlimited time***

http://starcon1-5.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/starcon1-5/models/

I made them in wings 3d, because it is awesome and free.  Also I used blender for the pixel coloring, because it is clunky but more fully featured, and free.

Took a quick look.  In general it's pretty nice.  It breaks down on some special cases like Earth.

Yeah, I played it and my thoughts were that their motivation for making the game was strange.

hey Atari,
I could make a starcontrol game that would allow you to keep your tm  for half the cost of these other guys.

print("Star Control 2009")
num = random() % 10
print ("Oh snap --- it's star control .... here comes the urquan ---zoinks")
if (num > 5)
  print ("oh diddly you lost")
else
 print("wowzers you saved the galaxy")


I mean they might as well have done that.  It has the same effect of keeping the tm, and the same effect of making fans of the original series think that ataris doing nothing to develop.

totally lame atari.

I also bought atari's axis and allies because I thought it would be something awesome like the turn based strategy board game.  Turned out it was a real time strategy and not a very good one.  At least the game play sucked.  The graphics were cool.

Come on Atari.  Game play ftw.

those are actually very cool clips.

I thought of using java at one point too, with jogl, it's actually quite nice.

You also get multiplatform almost for free.

In the end i also settled on c++ just because it was more stable and seemed to be quicker.  Java was eating my processor.

There was also a lot more 3rd libs in c++.

I would love the garbage collection of java, but with jni native code you do still have worry about memory.  No getting around it.

One of the aims of my clone game was to make my models open source to all.  I haven't put that together yet, but I will eventually, and then I'll post it here for anyone that wants them...

Unfortunately

my models < Dragons models

by a lot.

Yeah, this comic is awesome.    Too bad it's written at such a slow pace.  Ah well, I'll check again next year to get the next chapter.

wow. some more fabulous art.

Using smalltalk may make things simpler.  I'm using strictly c++.  Kindof crazy, as I'm running into some memory issues.

Are you using smalltalk just to do some scripting? or is smalltalk going to be where the bulk of the the work is done?

Still working on it.  Here's a video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSdvdar_j60

and here's my new fancy web page...
http://starcon1-5.sourceforge.net/