I would be very curious to see how ROTP ran within a Java emulator on Android
Then stop. Kidding, it’s an interesting discussion. Coincidently, I peeked at libGDX, and it seemed minimalist enough to be helpful for something like this without suffering from the upgrade treadmill a big engine would bring to a small team.
Either way, ROTP should be compatible with multiple OS for a long while, which is great, and I look forward to reading the design docs. And playing it, I guess :)
Couldn’t it run semi natively?
It’s been a few years since I looked at Android, but Google uses a proprietary JVM on Android. I suspect you would need some sort of emulation
One minor comment on readability: I love the Galactic News Network updates, but sometimes the red text is hard to read against the red background. Not a big deal.
This game has kept me up late a couple nights in a row. :)
Hey Ray, how about redoing Master of Magic next? That might take you into your golden years!
Thank you for your work on Remnants. I played the beta some time ago. It’s fantastic and probably even better now. I look forward to playing it again soon.
Wait wait wait. Are you trying to tell me that “write once, run everywhere” might come with some caveats?
At the very least I imagine you’d have to implement a whole new input layer. Which, unless that’s interesting in and of itself, meh.
Blame Google. They intentionally created an incompatible JVM because they didn’t want to risk having to pay any licensing fees to Oracle. There was a lawsuit. Google won.
They broke Java for money. Microsoft couldn’t get away with it, but Google did.
To be fair, Oracle as an entity exists almost entirely to collect licensing fees while pissing off developers and users for little if any reason, so screw 'em anyway.
Then Google should not have reverse-engineered an incompatible Java. They could have done what Microsoft did and create their own replacement language for Java.
The point is that it’s the users and developers who were screwed by this. Oracle and Google are just fine.
Totally fair points.
This is another example of why something like @Perky_Goth’s suggestion of libGDX makes sense.
They already worked out all the issues. It works on Raspberry Pi, Android, iOS, etc.
Keep in mind that decision would have been necessary in February 2015 when the project started, almost on a lark. Lots of things look obvious in the rear-view mirror.
Ouch. A certain space monster is ravaging my planets. I might be able to fight it if I massed all my fleets in one spot, but there’s never time to do that. I may be better off evacuating, taking the hit, and re-colonizing…
If he’s ravaging your planets, that means you’re winning! well at least you were winning.
Two options: 1) build up a fleet large enough to kill him, 2) abandon your planets before he arrives and recolonize them later.
Some people love the challenge of the monsters, and other people insisted that I put a “No Monsters” option in the game start options.
You’ll need a different kind of fleet based on what kind of monster it is
Hey, I’m glad to hear I’m winning! Or yeah, that I was winning until I lost a significant chunk of my navy and production. :)
I love the monster! I hope you leave it in. I suppose you could add an option to toggle it off, but I like the added challenge.
I think my monster is a crystalline entity. It moves very fast, jumping right next to my planet, and it has 7000 hit points. I’ve gotten it down to maybe 5500 with a subset of my fleet. With the entire fleet, I might take it down, but then I’d have to remove all ship defenses from all planets save one, which doesn’t thrill me. For now, I’m inclined to take the hit and recolonize.
ok, the crystal is a dps monster. It’s fast and it hits hard, but it will collapse from a big counterattack. You need a stack of ships that can deal 7000+ damage in a single turn while surviving its AOE pulsar attack that does a random 1 to 1000 points of hull damage each turn.
Hull damage affects every ship in a stack simultaneously, so if you surround the crystal with 8 million medium ships, all 8 million will die instantly. Large ships can survive if the RNG is nice, but huge ships will eat up the crystal.
The kind of ships that will kill the crystal will be swallowed up by the space amoeba. That requires a different kind of strategy.
Cool, good to know, lol. For now I’ve been mass-producing small and large ships; no huge ships at all. Maybe time to design one. As we’ve already discussed, the 6-design limit means I first have to make the painful decision of which existing ships to scrap. I actually fed some to the crystal in the first fight just so I could see what would happen in the battle, lol.
Also, what does the battle scanner special mod do, exactly? Is it the only way for me to gather intel on the makeup of enemy ships (not to mention space monsters)? Is the idea to put it on suicide scouts so they can learn about the enemy? I’ve got intel networks on my neighbors, but I can’t see much info at all on their ships.
Battle scanners give you full information of enemy ships in combat. They don’t work on monsters.
Your planets have battle scanners so you will automatically get full scans of enemy ships that enter into combat around them.
What you know about each enemy ship design is revealed in the Races screen under the Military tab for that race.
If you don’t have battle scanners in combat, you still get some information from being in combat… their armor, maneuverability, etc.
Thanks! That’s very helpful.