I wonder if it would be better to start with a new codebase at this point.
~20 years of code, fixes, workarounds, and with a lot of outdated methodologies[0]. I'd love for there to be a competitor to something like Eve or Elite Dangerous in the free software space, and VS is the closest thing I know of. but I don't know that it's worth trying to figure out the cobwebs.
[0] I'm not a SWE, so I may be completely wrong. This is from my limited perspective only.
Rewrite sections of the code base from scratch. Like the famous wooden sailing ships of old, one day you look up and realize no line of original code exists.
One of my favorite co-workers: "When someone hands me someone else's code to maintain, first thing I do, throw it out, rewrite it."
I tend to do that as well — although not all of a sudden. :-)
Hi! Just noticed this post :-)
I started the game in the late 90’s and open sourced it in 2001
The previous versions were win Mac Linux but the current dev team has been focusing on Linux right now.
At the time there were some mod communities like privateer Gemini gold with a polished release and Vega Trek; those also had windows builds that also work on wine. You might need to install into a folder with read/write permissions.
I've checked out Vega strike off and on again over the years. It always looked interesting but it always seemed like one of those early access, coming soon games that never arrived.
I'll admit, it's been at least 3 or 4 years since I last checked it out but after nearly a decade of waiting for something that resembled a full game I kind of gave up.
I might give it another try though now that I've seen this to see what's changed. it has been a few years now.
I'm not a coder and I'm stuck at this error while running VS2019 - compiling the latest code @github.
". : The term 'refreshenv' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the
path is correct and try again.
At C:\Users\Max\Source\Repos\Vega-Strike-Engine-Source\script\bootstrap.ps1:41 char:3
+ . refreshenv
+ ~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (refreshenv:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException"
There are a few Privateer fan remakes based on this engine. Too rough for my taste but still better flight controls than the original. Here's hoping they can polish this game
The recently restarted development work is focused on Linux, but the game historically ran on all the major OSes including Mac and Windows.
You could either download an older release for those platforms or wait for someone to get it building again. Or try yourself ;-)
(Vega Strike, among other things, had been stuck with really old versions of the ffmpeg/libav API and Python 2.x, so the first goal has been getting the code working with modern libraries, cleaning some code cruft, and generally tidying up)
Interesting. Haven't heard actually heard of many games that only run on Linux. Are there more examples of this? I know this game is very old, so there might not be many examples these days.
My own Space Nerds in Space[1], a Star Trek like multiplayer spaceship bridge simulator, is linux only. (There was a time when it ran on Macs, but I think that time is over.)
They’ve got it compiling on MacOS in the past few days. The link also mentions that it’s now compiling on Windows too. It references 0.9.0, but maybe pre-compiled binaries will appear for 0.8.0.
You haven't played it. I was following it for a while and even sent in a couple of patches (I don't think they were ever accepted though). The ground side user interfaces were horribly ugly to the point where it was hard to use:
(Yay I bought a new weapon! Huh, where is it? In the cargo bay?!? How do I get it mounted? I have to sell it and then rebuy it after I sell my current weapon!?)
At the time, the active devs were mainly implementing new shader models for all the ships. There was even some talk about porting the entire game to OGRE (that at least would have helped with some of the UX junk since they could get rid of the custom widgets).
The game code itself really needed to be reorganized. The way things were subclassed ended up with weird things like all the individual parts of the ship including items in your cargo hold effectively having fuel tanks (of nonzero size), blocking those from showing up in text descriptions, and hard-coding fuel handling code to ignore most (but not all parts of the ship). Or maybe it was armor. It was obtuse, but at least if you wanted your missile launcher to shoot missiles that can shoot spaceships it would be supported.
KSP, Space Engineers, Astroneer, Stationeers are/were all indie space games that look far, far better than this. From the unaliased (0,255,0) green text to the photographic planet textures that look horribly out of place to the bizarre cartoon drawings of NPCs to the stretched out text in the UI bars ('capacitor' etc) I can easily say that graphics are absolutely not a selling point of this game.
The graphics look comparable to Freespace 2, which is from 1999.
Considering it very likely is from 1999, (it is at least as old as around 2002-03 when I found out about it) it is unfair to say that it looks horrible compared to today's graphics.
not to mention that freespace 2 can actually look pretty decent these days. there is a community project that has upgraded the graphics and models over the years. it doesn't look like a 2021 AAA game, but it far surpasses anything that could run on 1999 hardware.
As the creator of that graphic, I can assure you that any such resemblance was totally unintentional, as I was young enough when I made it that the thought would never have occurred to me.
I must admit that one of my friends at school made the same comment back when I created it though. I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but after hearing it again 15 years later, I just had a solid laugh, so thanks!
It does surprise me that whoever redesigned the site chose to keep that ancient graphic and logo...
~20 years of code, fixes, workarounds, and with a lot of outdated methodologies[0]. I'd love for there to be a competitor to something like Eve or Elite Dangerous in the free software space, and VS is the closest thing I know of. but I don't know that it's worth trying to figure out the cobwebs.
[0] I'm not a SWE, so I may be completely wrong. This is from my limited perspective only.