Interesting game and quite addictive. I played until I got out of memory error. I think I was able to get level 8 and got score 128. That's what is visible in screen after crash. My guess is that out of memory occurs when there are multiple big ships and bullets bounce from those. I was able to get few bullets between three ships and then which were bouncing back and then shooting more bullets so those kept bouncy on screen.
There are but I think they are all Elderscrolls. Each Elderscroll has their pros and cons. Skyrim is probably best looking and music is excellent there. It also has those epic dragon fights. Well they are epic until you get your hero superhero that can handle those easily. I think that's also another issue with Skyrim, that for example you join to Mage Guild with character who hasn't never cast a spell before doing the initial test. If I rememeber correctly those can be pass with starting magic spells. After one day doing quests for the Guild you find yourself as a Archmage, which feels so wrong.
For Oblivion it is pretty much same as Skyrim expect it does not look that good as vanilla. But it has pretty much same issues as Skyrim.
Morrowind main map is same big area, which allows spellcasters cast flying or leviate spells and fly over city walls and so on. I think Morrowind had some restrictions that not all characters could join all the guilds and some guilds had probably restrictions that if you are member of another you are not allowed to join. Morrowind as an area is very unique and some might not like the look of envinroment.
Then there is the Daggerfall. I think with this Bethesda really tried to make fantasy simulator. It has features that other Elderscrolls lack: For instance gold pieces are heavy in your pocket, you go to bank and change that for letter of credit. You can take loan for bank. You can even travel to far away land and take big loan there and run back to your home territory and never pay back your loan. You can buy a ship or house if you want to. Map is huge and travelling there really requires fast travel(How ever you can still walk or ride horse or cart to next town if you want to. It just takes a lot of time). It has skills like climbing. I really miss that this hasn't been in newer Elderscrolls. Daggerfall also has swimming skill and swimming in plate armor is almost certain for drowing and only way to get up is drop the something heavy. This Elderscroll is challenging. Surviving even from the first dungeon in really challence(Maybe even too much). But there are still some problems: Dungeons this is were Daggerfall went to so wrong. Developpers thought that players do like exploring maze like dungeons, but it gets very tiring to doing this like over and over just to get quests done. Quests are pretty much fetch something, kill something and so one there are couple of variants and some of them have few choices to make. Some quest are bad specially like fetch some mummy wrapping from Harpies nest and mummy wrapping from Alchemist Store is not suitable for doing the quest.
Since world is almost complete procedurally generated, quests are also random(not including the main quest) people in those towns are just random NPCs. But going for example City of Daggerfall where there are multiple shops, inns and thousands of people is still awesome and amazing. There is also Daggerfall Unity which is Daggerfall remake to Unity engine which fixes quite much of problems, like it allows to have smaller dungeons. Daggerfall Unity for example upgrades climbing and player can move sideways while climbing and swinging over the ledges.
Those dungeons have two sides. For example there can be a pit in dungeon. Player could find lever somewhere in dungeon(Finding this would probably require lots of fighting) which would lover the bridge over cap. Good character might be able jump or climp over the pit or use levitate or featherfall. I kind like that it really allows you play your character. But when you do this multiple times it gets tiresome.
That only works since there are no portable ladders, climbing skill or levitate/fly spell in Skyrim. :D It feels pretty stupid if you have played previous Elder scroll with both climbing skill and levitate spells, but mentioning the ladder makes it even worse.
Weird... I always felt like Skyrim and Oblivion actually fixed this exact problem with traditional RPG quests. Admittedly, there are plenty of quests in those games with only one solution (I frigging hate the House Of Horrors quest for this!), but a huge number of them have multiple routes to a solution. In fact, the example you listed is used several times in both games: Instead of killing the target (the obvious solution) you can instead pick his pocket, or persuade him to just give you the McGuffin. I didn't realize these options were available (they're not listed or hinted at in most of the quest descriptions, so perhaps that is the bigger issue) and only discovered them on subsequent playthroughs when my other skills were sufficient; if you don't have enough skill in speechcraft, pickpocket, or telekinesis, the failure of those attempts seem like there just isn't an alternative solution.
I usually don't play as rogue or thief so that pick pocket I would not have spotted. Instead I play usually character with high speech or persuade so I should have been able to spot that. One thing I found funny in Skyrim was that most of the dungeons were loops. There was hidden door at the end of the dungeon so player did not need to walk over whole dungeon when quest was done. This is mixed thing for me. It probably makes the game more player friendly but it shoots realism into knee. Oblivion dungeons player needed to walk back whole dungeon.
If you are interested about Meso-American RPG, there is Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire, Altough it is turn based and quite old. So UX is not up to modern standards. While playing I find it easier to play full on keyboard and not using the mouse, but learning that it takes time. Game actually has nice feature that each of tribes have their own currency, which is kind of cool. Some of them require blue feathers, some diamons and so on.
I like RPG when you actually can play role so that game does not force you to do things in certain way. There should be multiple ways/methods to solve quests. For example Fallout 2 is good example in this. I think this is the most imporant thing in RPG. I hate quest like Skyrim and Oblivions where you have one single way to do the quest and it is usually killing somebody and getting item from them. Only option is to not to do the quest at all. But more interesting quest would be that item to get would be in safe. Player could of course kill the NPC who has it and then get item. But player should be able to persuade, buy it or steal it without killing the NPC. Or maybe even do another quest for the NPC and then gain that item as a reward. I understand these kind of quest require a lot of work from developping team and are there for much harder to do than simple kill and fetch quests.
I prefer single player game over multiplayer game. If game only has single character and no party then first person view is okay. Otherwise I would like to player from 3rd person or isometric view and turn base game.
RPG should have quite much dialog with choices and things to read, no need for voice acting, specially if it is bad voice acting. Crafting and grinding is one thing I don't usually like in RPG. If these are done well, crafting is okay. There should many different items and make your character unique with some special perks or traits to pick while gaining level or experience.
Party or single character is a bit tough choice. They both have their pros and cons. Single character from first person view can be very immersive. But characters in these games can get overpowerful compared to other characters in the game. Games with party you can usually have more complex builds and try out different things which is good thing. Also turn base combat can be more interesting with party.
Biggest update is new AI difficulty levels: Weak, Normal and Challenging. Weak is pretty much the old AI, just with minor fixes. Biggest difference between these difficulty levels is how AI does the space exploration. On weak it tries to move around the sun by keeping certain distance from the sun. This causes AI to move already explored sectors and isn't effective. On normal difficulty AI also tries to keep distance but same time move sectors which give most of the new unexplored sectors. Finally on challenging AI goes greed and only moves sectors which give most of new explored sectors. Main idea is that with better AI for exploration AI will eventually gain more planets and be more better in game.
There are also some minor changes for example how populations are handled on planets with higher difficulty levels. Challenging AI will not allow blocking planets by moving fleets there, it will try to send another fleet from another planet to destroy that. AI is also more aggressive, since earlier there was issue that AI did not make war against human player if borders were crossed too often. These changes make game more challenging, I probably didn't win once while playing test games if there was ancient realms in game.
There are two new space races in the game too: Alteirians and Smaugirians. Alteirians are bit different to each other space races. These guys are weak but very smart folk. They don't live on planet surfaces but on planet orbitals. This cause that Alteirians are very easy to conquer by simply destroying their orbital. Because they live on orbital they get big negatives on population production and mining which makes them really slow on building at beginning of the game. On the other hand their research can be over 4 times at beginning compared to other races. Alteirians also have challenging time against space pirates since they can be encoutered quite early and are able to destroy Alteirian orbital. In fact Alteirians were the first space race that I actually lost complete during test games. On that I noticed that game is missing own "you lost" screen. This is now added, and player can choose if he/she wants to see results immediately or let AI finish the game.
Another new space race is Smaugirians. These are folk that can place weapons and privateering modules to their freighters. These guys also have two new government types: Syndicate and Pirates. So in short Smaugirians can be played as space pirating race, if wanted. When their freighters have weapons other realms still count them as unarmed.
There are also some minor changes, like auto shoot in combat simply clicking the enemy ship. Also by default human player won't get all the news from other realms before they have had diplomatic meeting. Game can be also configured so that each realm is controlled by AI, so human can just watch how AI is playing the game. This is mostly when doing AI update, but it is there if someone else is interested see how AI plays. There are small changes also for tech trees. In theory each space race could have their own tech tree, but mostly they have shared techs. There are some exceptions for exampl Alteirians do not have terra forming tech since they don't live on planet, but they have bigger orbitals and orbital lifts. Mechions and Lithorians do not have food production tech since those guys do not eat. Instead they have research and mining tech available only for those.
I am using these ships for smuggler race in my 4x game. If you want to use them, they are under same license as are the original ones and no need to credit me.
Hmm, so there is probably something different in Windows 7 and Windows 10. It seems there some people has issue with Windows 10 and Minecraft, but that's probably different since Minecraft does not use Swing but something else for rendering the screen. This could be difficult to fix since fullscreen mode is done with three lines and there isn't much to change.
I was able to reproduce drawing issue with full-screen mode with Windows 7. It wasn't blocking the alt+tab but otherwise it was just showing the white screen. If Windows had scaling set to 150% drawing worked but some of the UI buttons went offscreen and game isn't playable at then. However I was able to get this working with full-screen in Windows 7 with following: Full-screen mode on, disable OpenGL hardware support and set scaling from Windows to 100%. Danimal, could you try if these would work with Windows 10?
Interesting game and quite addictive. I played until I got out of memory error. I think I was able to get level 8 and got score 128. That's what is visible in screen after crash. My guess is that out of memory occurs when there are multiple big ships and bullets bounce from those. I was able to get few bullets between three ships and then which were bouncing back and then shooting more bullets so those kept bouncy on screen.
@buttons:
There're like...no such games?
There are but I think they are all Elderscrolls. Each Elderscroll has their pros and cons. Skyrim is probably best looking and music is excellent there. It also has those epic dragon fights. Well they are epic until you get your hero superhero that can handle those easily. I think that's also another issue with Skyrim, that for example you join to Mage Guild with character who hasn't never cast a spell before doing the initial test. If I rememeber correctly those can be pass with starting magic spells. After one day doing quests for the Guild you find yourself as a Archmage, which feels so wrong.
For Oblivion it is pretty much same as Skyrim expect it does not look that good as vanilla. But it has pretty much same issues as Skyrim.
Morrowind main map is same big area, which allows spellcasters cast flying or leviate spells and fly over city walls and so on. I think Morrowind had some restrictions that not all characters could join all the guilds and some guilds had probably restrictions that if you are member of another you are not allowed to join. Morrowind as an area is very unique and some might not like the look of envinroment.
Then there is the Daggerfall. I think with this Bethesda really tried to make fantasy simulator. It has features that other Elderscrolls lack: For instance gold pieces are heavy in your pocket, you go to bank and change that for letter of credit. You can take loan for bank. You can even travel to far away land and take big loan there and run back to your home territory and never pay back your loan. You can buy a ship or house if you want to. Map is huge and travelling there really requires fast travel(How ever you can still walk or ride horse or cart to next town if you want to. It just takes a lot of time). It has skills like climbing. I really miss that this hasn't been in newer Elderscrolls. Daggerfall also has swimming skill and swimming in plate armor is almost certain for drowing and only way to get up is drop the something heavy. This Elderscroll is challenging. Surviving even from the first dungeon in really challence(Maybe even too much). But there are still some problems: Dungeons this is were Daggerfall went to so wrong. Developpers thought that players do like exploring maze like dungeons, but it gets very tiring to doing this like over and over just to get quests done. Quests are pretty much fetch something, kill something and so one there are couple of variants and some of them have few choices to make. Some quest are bad specially like fetch some mummy wrapping from Harpies nest and mummy wrapping from Alchemist Store is not suitable for doing the quest.
Since world is almost complete procedurally generated, quests are also random(not including the main quest) people in those towns are just random NPCs. But going for example City of Daggerfall where there are multiple shops, inns and thousands of people is still awesome and amazing. There is also Daggerfall Unity which is Daggerfall remake to Unity engine which fixes quite much of problems, like it allows to have smaller dungeons. Daggerfall Unity for example upgrades climbing and player can move sideways while climbing and swinging over the ledges.
Those dungeons have two sides. For example there can be a pit in dungeon. Player could find lever somewhere in dungeon(Finding this would probably require lots of fighting) which would lover the bridge over cap. Good character might be able jump or climp over the pit or use levitate or featherfall. I kind like that it really allows you play your character. But when you do this multiple times it gets tiresome.
That only works since there are no portable ladders, climbing skill or levitate/fly spell in Skyrim. :D It feels pretty stupid if you have played previous Elder scroll with both climbing skill and levitate spells, but mentioning the ladder makes it even worse.
@MedicineStorm:
Weird... I always felt like Skyrim and Oblivion actually fixed this exact problem with traditional RPG quests. Admittedly, there are plenty of quests in those games with only one solution (I frigging hate the House Of Horrors quest for this!), but a huge number of them have multiple routes to a solution. In fact, the example you listed is used several times in both games: Instead of killing the target (the obvious solution) you can instead pick his pocket, or persuade him to just give you the McGuffin. I didn't realize these options were available (they're not listed or hinted at in most of the quest descriptions, so perhaps that is the bigger issue) and only discovered them on subsequent playthroughs when my other skills were sufficient; if you don't have enough skill in speechcraft, pickpocket, or telekinesis, the failure of those attempts seem like there just isn't an alternative solution.
I usually don't play as rogue or thief so that pick pocket I would not have spotted. Instead I play usually character with high speech or persuade so I should have been able to spot that. One thing I found funny in Skyrim was that most of the dungeons were loops. There was hidden door at the end of the dungeon so player did not need to walk over whole dungeon when quest was done. This is mixed thing for me. It probably makes the game more player friendly but it shoots realism into knee. Oblivion dungeons player needed to walk back whole dungeon.
If you are interested about Meso-American RPG, there is Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire, Altough it is turn based and quite old. So UX is not up to modern standards. While playing I find it easier to play full on keyboard and not using the mouse, but learning that it takes time. Game actually has nice feature that each of tribes have their own currency, which is kind of cool. Some of them require blue feathers, some diamons and so on.
I like RPG when you actually can play role so that game does not force you to do things in certain way. There should be multiple ways/methods to solve quests. For example Fallout 2 is good example in this. I think this is the most imporant thing in RPG. I hate quest like Skyrim and Oblivions where you have one single way to do the quest and it is usually killing somebody and getting item from them. Only option is to not to do the quest at all. But more interesting quest would be that item to get would be in safe. Player could of course kill the NPC who has it and then get item. But player should be able to persuade, buy it or steal it without killing the NPC. Or maybe even do another quest for the NPC and then gain that item as a reward. I understand these kind of quest require a lot of work from developping team and are there for much harder to do than simple kill and fetch quests.
I prefer single player game over multiplayer game. If game only has single character and no party then first person view is okay. Otherwise I would like to player from 3rd person or isometric view and turn base game.
RPG should have quite much dialog with choices and things to read, no need for voice acting, specially if it is bad voice acting. Crafting and grinding is one thing I don't usually like in RPG. If these are done well, crafting is okay. There should many different items and make your character unique with some special perks or traits to pick while gaining level or experience.
Party or single character is a bit tough choice. They both have their pros and cons. Single character from first person view can be very immersive. But characters in these games can get overpowerful compared to other characters in the game. Games with party you can usually have more complex builds and try out different things which is good thing. Also turn base combat can be more interesting with party.
New version of Open Realm of Stars is available. 0.20.0Beta is available in Github or Itch.io:
https://github.com/tuomount/Open-Realms-of-Stars
https://reemax.itch.io/open-realm-of-stars
Biggest update is new AI difficulty levels: Weak, Normal and Challenging. Weak is pretty much the old AI, just with minor fixes. Biggest difference between these difficulty levels is how AI does the space exploration. On weak it tries to move around the sun by keeping certain distance from the sun. This causes AI to move already explored sectors and isn't effective. On normal difficulty AI also tries to keep distance but same time move sectors which give most of the new unexplored sectors. Finally on challenging AI goes greed and only moves sectors which give most of new explored sectors. Main idea is that with better AI for exploration AI will eventually gain more planets and be more better in game.
There are also some minor changes for example how populations are handled on planets with higher difficulty levels. Challenging AI will not allow blocking planets by moving fleets there, it will try to send another fleet from another planet to destroy that. AI is also more aggressive, since earlier there was issue that AI did not make war against human player if borders were crossed too often. These changes make game more challenging, I probably didn't win once while playing test games if there was ancient realms in game.
There are two new space races in the game too: Alteirians and Smaugirians. Alteirians are bit different to each other space races. These guys are weak but very smart folk. They don't live on planet surfaces but on planet orbitals. This cause that Alteirians are very easy to conquer by simply destroying their orbital. Because they live on orbital they get big negatives on population production and mining which makes them really slow on building at beginning of the game. On the other hand their research can be over 4 times at beginning compared to other races. Alteirians also have challenging time against space pirates since they can be encoutered quite early and are able to destroy Alteirian orbital. In fact Alteirians were the first space race that I actually lost complete during test games. On that I noticed that game is missing own "you lost" screen. This is now added, and player can choose if he/she wants to see results immediately or let AI finish the game.
Another new space race is Smaugirians. These are folk that can place weapons and privateering modules to their freighters. These guys also have two new government types: Syndicate and Pirates. So in short Smaugirians can be played as space pirating race, if wanted. When their freighters have weapons other realms still count them as unarmed.
There are also some minor changes, like auto shoot in combat simply clicking the enemy ship. Also by default human player won't get all the news from other realms before they have had diplomatic meeting. Game can be also configured so that each realm is controlled by AI, so human can just watch how AI is playing the game. This is mostly when doing AI update, but it is there if someone else is interested see how AI plays. There are small changes also for tech trees. In theory each space race could have their own tech tree, but mostly they have shared techs. There are some exceptions for exampl Alteirians do not have terra forming tech since they don't live on planet, but they have bigger orbitals and orbital lifts. Mechions and Lithorians do not have food production tech since those guys do not eat. Instead they have research and mining tech available only for those.
I am using these ships for smuggler race in my 4x game. If you want to use them, they are under same license as are the original ones and no need to credit me.
Hmm, so there is probably something different in Windows 7 and Windows 10. It seems there some people has issue with Windows 10 and Minecraft, but that's probably different since Minecraft does not use Swing but something else for rendering the screen. This could be difficult to fix since fullscreen mode is done with three lines and there isn't much to change.
I was able to reproduce drawing issue with full-screen mode with Windows 7. It wasn't blocking the alt+tab but otherwise it was just showing the white screen. If Windows had scaling set to 150% drawing worked but some of the UI buttons went offscreen and game isn't playable at then. However I was able to get this working with full-screen in Windows 7 with following: Full-screen mode on, disable OpenGL hardware support and set scaling from Windows to 100%. Danimal, could you try if these would work with Windows 10?
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