Ananta - small tech preview released

edit 20080508: Worklog

edit 20080313: updated download link to the latest release

I've released a small technology preview minigame version of Ananta, my freeware 2d space combat/trading/exploring game in progress. The gameplay in this version is very simple, quite unlike what I've envisioned for the future version. This preview is basically a slow-paced Asteroids-clone with gravity and few other twists, but the future idea is to build an Escape Velocity style game combining features from Elite II Frontier, X3, and some others.



Few more screenshots here

It doesn't look (or sound) like much yet, but nevertheless it's playable and sports a zoomable viewport, minimap and such. The physics and space flight in general is fully newtonian, with things like gravity, thruster forces, rotational kinetics and elastic collision physics fully simulated.

There is a complex framework under the hood that isn't quite visible in the early release. Ship design is built from the ground up with modularity in mind. Ship behaviour is based on installed ship components and the components' performances and weights. The ship design - along with everything else - is fully configurable through xml files.

This is a very early phase: there are still tons of things to do even before the basic game engine is 'finished' enough to start working on the next phase.

In the meantime, please give it a go and tell me what you think.

Win32 binary download


Readme.txt:

I am in love with this kind of game, I wish I could find an emulator of elite I've always wanted to try that. Unfortunately I have a mac so I can't try it but keep up the good work anyways lol.
Also, don't base it too much on EV. I have bough EV nova and it doesn't stress trading enough, so it's pretty boring because fighting is too hard. Make it a game where you can own "shops" or even islands and stuff and it'll be great :)

How does this sound like for a finished game? ;)

unfortunately I don't have time to read all that but I skimmed it, and in response for it in case you want new ideas and these ideas aren't in there, here is my simplified description of my dream game.

ships should be heavily modifiable like in EV nova. Licenses, different ships that can equip different weapons, limited space it's all great.

fluctuating market. Market prices should change, but different planets or regions whatever should produce X of X resource, and other regions will pay through their nose to get it, so you can establish routes.

Gravity, I believe you mentioned, would be cool and a great boon to your game, something most others probably don't have.

missions are generally lame, probably only should have a training mission chain.

possibility to own planets, solar systems, or even galaxies, all the way down to even just one building with employees and such.

different races, like EV nova.

"police" "pirate" "trader" and "merchant" AI's.

I can't think of more atm.

I agree about Escape Velocity focusing too much on combat for true Elite fans like myself. Pretty much everything you described as your dream game is mentioned in the wiki page. The intention is to make it lean heavily towards dynamic economy and X3-style 'space mogulism', as I like to put it.

The game is open-source and platform independent (tested on Linux), so if you want to compile it yourself, the sources for this release are available in the google code downloads section. It requires three Brucey's modules in the compilation, which are mentioned in the building_prerequisites.txt file.

ok thx :)
personally I love the merchant aspect and I'm always looking for that type of game, so if you want to make it tailor-made to me stress that :D

This seems interesting. I used to love Elite-style games. Good luck with it.

Looking, good!

My favourite in this genre was Solar winds.

Just a heads-up, a worklog for this project has been created:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=9969&log=1603

Head over there to see a procedural galaxy generator in action.

Did anyone ever play Star Sonata? It was an online game like this and had tons of features. Unfortunately, it was not only a tiny bit buggy, but it had some things I just didn't like (like if you log out and you're moving even slightly, when you log back in, you'll have floated around for all that time with no idea which way to go or where you are). Still, it was fun, with great features (gravity, tons of missions, weapons, levels, skills, personalized "dungeon" galaxies), and the only thing that made me quit was the fact that you had to pay to get past level 20.

Yeah, Star Sonata has many of the features I'm planning to implement in my game, although for the time being Ananta will be single player only. I especially like the dynamic economy and player-owned space stations in Star Sonata. Economy will play a big part (if not the biggest) in Ananta as well. It's not a trivial thing to code and surely is hard to balance so that the dynamic economy fluctuations will not get to extremes.