SpaceGeeks.org

Hi,

Many things to tell you:

• the site is in the process of being translated in French while English is abandoned (for the moment). The Library is already up and running, with a lot more articles (there are 178 at this time). It's far from finished but it goes well. I should be able to improve it this weekend.

• I'm working on a technical manual for 22nd century engineers by explaining ships' engineering principles: what a starship is made of, why, and how to make it work or work around. Reactors, energy, conduits, propulsion systems, computers, control systems, tactical systems, etc. The manuel is over 19 pages now and should not grow beyond 20 pages at this point. Most of the manual is taken from the Library (or rather: I wrote the manual and included chapters into existing or new articles). The fact is we want the ship to be as "realistic" as possible and give everyone the opportunity to tune it, from an engineer point of view. Of course, the levels of details will strip this aspect if the player decides he does not want to get bored with it. Upgrading the ship will not be as easy as it is in other games because more parameters are to be taken into account.

• On the developers' side, my friends take an interest into Raydium. It's an opensource game engine quite easy to use and they tend to both agree on it. So Raydium could make its way into the project and speed things up.

• A friend of mine is drawing some aliens for us, as suggestions for the games and I can't wait to see them! I even designed one myself and I find it to be quite menacing. It could make a nice villain.

So to make it short: yes, we're working on Space Geeks and it looks very well like we have more time to work on it than before.

Next entry and the blog itself should be in French.

Take care, Drasche.

Thanks to some special offer from ovh.com to Belgian residents (which I am), I now have a remote host and the Space Geeks web site is no longer hosted at home. The main url is always spacegeeks.org but from now on the domain is redirected to spacegeeks.be instead of a DynDNS-style URL. After nearly three months, I can shut my home webserver down for good.

What about the work? Well, we've all been busy around and Space Geeks did not make improvements. I am still documenting myself on various related topics while playing some good games. The others are busy as well, and find some time to study OpenGL. For the moment, I think the most significant progress has been made on the design of Space Geeks Academy but I am still far from the end. Right now, I'm thinking about the right computer interface for the Federation ships, which would be easily recognizable, just as LCARS is for Star Trek.

It's not everyday that we launch some big (did you say huge?) project on the net and stick on with it. So this is it. The website is still small, but it's there. The forum has been set up last month, and has been filled with useful information and guidelines about what we want to do. Oh, I almost forgot to tell what we want to do!

With a couple of friends and some volonteers, we plan to make Space Geeks, a video game in the ancient Elite spirit. In case you do not know Elite, check this Wikipedia page about the game.

The first step is to emulate the Elite spirit: same kind of interface, same kind of music, same trading and navigation mechanisms. And the whole thing must run on Windows, Linux, and maybe MacOS (if we meet MacOS developers). Then to go on with more realism. Physical spatial engine, true navigation, true economy, more ships, more planetary systems, etc.

For more information, check the game design document linked on this page.

Space Geeks is not only about an Elite-kind of game. It's also about an entire universe, some space opera in the tradition of Star Wars and Star Trek. The adventures of the United Federation of Geeks and the other factions will be told in the library.

You are welcome to help us make this dream come true.

Official links to the forum and library are in the column on the right of this page (right now there are just redirections).