Awesome job so far everyone! Please give us your feedback on how our article efforts are going. We still need more finished articles for our May contest theme: Remake the Classics

You cannot edit this project

Epoch Star v0.91.07

Developer:

Battagline

Platform:

Windows

Date Added:

Feb 06 2005 01:56 PM

Updated:

Mar 02 2006 02:35 AM

Epoch Star is a cross genre Epic Space Adventure / Space RPG in the spirit of older games such as Star Control II and Starflight.

-Explore Star Systems
-Meet Strange Aliens
-Outfit your ship with powerful weapons
-Train your crew
-Choose from hundreds of ships
-Combat with powerful Alien Races

Download

Epoch Star is a cross genre Epic Space Adventure / Space RPG in the spirit of older games such as Star Control II and Starflight. The player chooses a ship and his crew�s statistics. As the game progresses, the player may upgrade his ship with new weapons and devices, or may upgrade to a new ship altogether. His crew also gains experience as the game progresses and may use the experience gained to improve his crew�s skills. The player is given tasks to accomplish in the form of missions, and through the dialog in those missions, the plot of the Epic is gradually revealed to the player. Combat is intended to be fast paced and action oriented, and game play includes character building aspects of an RPG.

Epoch Star is currently in a pre-alpha phase, and is not currently feature complete. Also, it has been tested on limited hardware.

For more information, bug lists, or to suggest a change to Epoch Star please visit the Epoch Star discussion forums

I've recently modified the controls, so please read.

Mouse:
Left Click: Fires Weapons Toward Cursor.
Right Click: Cycle through weapons.
Mouse Wheel: Zooms in and out.

Keyboard:
ESCAPE Key: Options Menu.
W-Key: Engine Thrust
S-Key: Reduce Engine Thrust.
A-Key: Turn Left.
D-Key: Turn Left.
F-Key: Cycles Through Equipped Weapons.
G-Key: Cycles Back Through Equipped Weapons.

+/- Keys: Zoom in and out.
F1-F10 Keys: Selects Designated Weapon.

For more detailed instructions please visit www.epochstar.com

1Ghz Pentium 3 or better; 256 MB of RAM; 150 MB Hard Drive space; 32 MB Video Card tested primarily with Nvidia and ATI cards. DirectX 8.1 or better. Pixel shaders only work on ATI cards at the moment.

for mor information visit www.epochstar.com

You cannot edit this project

61 Comments

Pages
1
2
3

Battagline

Feb 07 2005 02:53 PM

This is my first game, so I would appreciate any feedback you have to offer. It's still a work in progress, so please be gentle. It's relatively stable, but it doesn't work with all video cards yet, so please let me know if it's not working on your system.

Thanks,
Battagline

[Edited by - Battagline on July 12, 2005 4:53:26 PM]

Guest

Feb 08 2005 04:59 PM

Downloaded it and thought it was an amzing little piece of work, on a side no when i had finished playing and exited the game it had resized my desktop wallpaper to 800x600 which is what i'm assuming the actual game resolution is. Strange side effect migh want to look into that. Overall quite enjoyable and the engine effects and space cloude were very nice.

Battagline

Feb 09 2005 06:27 AM

Thanks for your feedback. Would you mind letting me know what video card your running?

[Edited by - Battagline on July 12, 2005 5:27:01 PM]

Nahrix

Feb 23 2005 04:45 PM

Absolutely beautiful. Keep working at it, and I'm sure you'll be an all-star programmer.

Battagline

Feb 24 2005 09:15 AM

Such kind words... mmmm makes me happy.

WallyWaffle

Feb 25 2005 01:39 PM

Just played this game today, its actually quite fun. Hard to beleive that this was made by just one person. The missions are pretty cool, after playing just a few of them, there seems to be a pretty interesting plot developing. Every race seems to have their own story which is an interesting addition to the general shoot-em up theme.

Guest

Mar 05 2005 09:50 AM

Being a big Starflight fan i was very happy to find a your game.
I linked to your site on the forum on strategycore.co.uk and told them guys to go and download your awesome game! Link: http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index.php?s=eff8855c14dd5744e02337317cbb9c95&showtopic=3380

I hope that's ok with you ?

Battagline

Mar 06 2005 07:08 AM

Quote:
Original post by Anonymous Poster
Being a big Starflight fan i was very happy to find a your game.
I linked to your site on the forum on strategycore.co.uk and told them guys to go and download your awesome game! Link: http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index.php?s=eff8855c14dd5744e02337317cbb9c95&showtopic=3380

I hope that's ok with you ?

Absolutely!!! I want people to play my game and give me feedback. Right now I'm working on shrinking the download size because many people wanted it to be smaller. But please... if you like the game, tell people about it. If you don't, feel free to send me an email (support@epochstar.com) telling me what you think it's missing.

mumpo

Mar 10 2005 04:59 PM

The game is cool, but I did discover a serious bug. While I was playing I got an instant message, so I tried to alt-escape out. Windows almost succeeded in transfering input focus away from your game (the input focus was really jumpy, but it wasn't on the game), but the game kept rendering on top, resulting in a complete mess where I couldn't tell what I was doing well enough to either switch back to or shut down your game for about 5 minutes. Thanks to XP's wussification of the task manager, I couldn't even get that to go on top of your game. Basically I just clicked around using flickers of the obscured windows to guide me until I managed to get back into the game, which crashed without an error message a few minutes later. You need to teach your game to share better. Keep at it.

Battagline

Mar 11 2005 07:58 AM

Quote:
Original post by mumpo
The game is cool, but I did discover a serious bug. While I was playing I got an instant message, so I tried to alt-escape out. Windows almost succeeded in transfering input focus away from your game (the input focus was really jumpy, but it wasn't on the game), but the game kept rendering on top, resulting in a complete mess where I couldn't tell what I was doing well enough to either switch back to or shut down your game for about 5 minutes. Thanks to XP's wussification of the task manager, I couldn't even get that to go on top of your game. Basically I just clicked around using flickers of the obscured windows to guide me until I managed to get back into the game, which crashed without an error message a few minutes later. You need to teach your game to share better. Keep at it.

I was partially aware of this problem. At one point I could alt-tab in and out without incident. But recently I noticed if you alt-tab out of the game, the game just goes away. I've never had the problem you've had were alt-tab resulted in it going berzerk, but I'll look into the issue.

Thanks for the input.

DrGUI

Apr 04 2005 01:17 AM

I'm sure it's a great game, but even on the first menu it was really jerky for me. I'm on quite an old computer but the menu didn't look like it would use a lot of fillrate or vertices.
It would be good if you could get a list of controls from in the game [grin]!
Also, after the aliens came on at the start (couldn't kill them because too jerky) I crashed into an asteroid and about 3 secs later the game just disappeared. No error message. Maybe a log would be cool to help you with those sort of bugs.

My computer config is:
Pentium 800MHz 256MB RAM
but new NVidia GeForce FX 5200
Windows 2000 Professional
DirectX 9.0c

I know I can't blame you for your cool game not working on my computer, I know its about 7 years old and I need a new one :-)

BTW: did you use JPEG compression on the menu images in the Arms Dealer bit of the space station?

Battagline

Apr 05 2005 09:59 AM

Quote:
Original post by DrGUI
I'm sure it's a great game, but even on the first menu it was really jerky for me. I'm on quite an old computer but the menu didn't look like it would use a lot of fillrate or vertices.

I'm a bit surprised by this. One of my computers is a PIII 800, and the game runs fine on it. Do you happen to know what version of my game you're running? If you still have the download file it would be in the file's name.

Sorry it didn't run so well on your computer.

DrGUI

Apr 17 2005 07:55 AM

Version 0.40.01

Battagline

Apr 18 2005 07:17 AM

Quote:
Original post by DrGUI
Version 0.40.01

Thanks, I'll take a look.

wiggyh

May 30 2005 01:07 PM

I was playing your game and when I got to the level where you have to defend the Lagionite Aggressor ship at the Ymorpha system. It won't let me leave the system it says something along the line of "finish mission first", but at the bottom it says "mission complete" and I have killed all the enemy ships on the level. It is version 0.50.03. Besides that it is a really good game.

Battagline

May 30 2005 01:42 PM

Quote:
Original post by wiggyh
I was playing your game and when I got to the level where you have to defend the Lagionite Aggressor ship at the Ymorpha system. It won't let me leave the system it says something along the line of "finish mission first", but at the bottom it says "mission complete" and I have killed all the enemy ships on the level. It is version 0.50.03. Besides that it is a really good game.

Someone else mentioned this at one point. I think the problem may be if the ship your defending gets destroyed. I haven't been able to replicate the problem yet, but I have a rediculous number of changes and fixes to make at this point. Try the mission again and pay attention to the ship your trying to defend. If it happens to get destroyed before it reaches it's target, see if that's where the bug kicks in. I'll look into it when I get a chance.

Thanks [smile]

Jeku

May 31 2005 10:32 AM

This game looks awesome, I will definitely try it when I get home tonight

Can I ask what language it was written with?

Battagline

Jun 01 2005 02:24 AM

Quote:
Original post by Jeku
This game looks awesome, I will definitely try it when I get home tonight

Can I ask what language it was written with?

Visual C++ and DirectX 8. It's a work in progress. I hope you enjoy it [smile]

mike74

Jun 04 2005 07:49 AM

This game, just like your spaceship tester, is insanely slow. It runs at 1-2 fps on my computer. Judging by what it's doing and my computer performance, it should be pulling 50-60 fps with no problem. I ran the Michael Jackson wrestling game on this same PC and achieved such frame rates.

Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/

Battagline

Jun 05 2005 12:43 PM

Hmmm... I don't have an integrated card myself, so I'll have to find someone I know who has one I can test this on. I pull down 50 - 60 on this game with my setup:

P4 2.5 GHZ, 512 MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9600

and around 30 with my second machine:

P3 800 MHZ, 256 MB Ram, GE Force 4 (can't remember the exact model).

DrGUI said he had the same problem on a thread I had related to performance.

Linky

Later he said when he ran it in release mode it ran fine:

Quote:
Original post by DrGUI
I tried the new version for you, but I'm afraid it still ran at 2-5 fps!

I left task manager running during the opening screen - because that is just as slow - it used hardly any memory but about 60% of the processor time was kernel!
Hopefully that relevation should help? I'm sorry I can't help more.
I just tried PIX - that didn't work either - probably meant for DX9.

Grrr- silly me! Release mode ran it fine! That hasn't impacted any other games or DX samples though... *feels stupid and contrite*

Suggestion - it would be nice to have a circle or something around the enemy ship when you've locked it - I got confused and died

Keep up the good work!

Is it possible you are having the same issue?

Thanks

mike74

Jun 06 2005 09:11 AM

What do you mean by running it in release mode? Are you talking about release mode of DirectX?

Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/

Battagline

Jun 06 2005 10:08 AM

I believe so. I put DrGUI's post in my previous post, as well as a link to that thread. I didn't actually do anything to help his performance issue, he fixed it himself so I really can't tell you for certain, but I do believe that he had either installed or set up the developer debug version of DirectX rather than the Release version. He also mentioned that the problem didn't seem to affect any other program, so it's probably something I can fix in my code, but in the mean time, if you are able to work around it, you may be interested in doing that. It would also confirm that the problem is not that you have an integrated card that my program can't yet handle.

Thanks for your help

Kal_Torak

Jun 16 2005 02:45 PM

I have not tried it yet, but, wow! Looks cool!

Made by just one little you?

[/impressed>

DrGUI

Jun 17 2005 02:53 AM

Quote:
Original post by Battagline
...but I do believe that he had either installed or set up the developer debug version of DirectX rather than the Release version.

I think the SDK installer has an option to be able to switch between debug and runtime on the DirectX control panel.

Quote:
Original post by Battagline
He also mentioned that the problem didn't seem to affect any other program, so it's probably something I can fix in my code,...

Well I only really use Quake and my game...but you said you used lots of pixel shaders...Quake III Arena doesn't use any so maybe that's why it was fast. Now I have a theory that the debug runtime inexplicitly slows down pixel shaders...maybe no optimization even if the flags are set to optimize?

Maybe now my game will be alright if you zoom into the cartoon-shaded model loads instead of slowing to 2 or 3 fps [grin]

OMG!! Only 1 exam left!!!!! Then I'm gonna finish my game!!!

DrGUI

Jun 17 2005 02:55 AM

Ah! Maybe you're going to do more on this, but I see that you put in the features list above 'Train your crew'. Methinks you need to do something more on that because am I right in thinking that as of version 0.50.03 the only thing it affects is some of the armour?

EDIT: I'll be quiet...just looked at your blog [grin]

Pages
1
2
3

Google Sign in options

Epoch Star v0.91.07

Share:

61 Comments

Navigation

Customer Service

Company Info

Google Sign in options

Epoch Star v0.91.07

Share:

61 Comments

Navigation

Customer Service

Company Info

Sign In