Hi !

Well, as you all seem to be too shy to use the Tavern, I'll help you out and start the very first thread

I'd like to present another project I'm working on from time to time, called Cobalt Project.
The name is just temporary, until I find something more suitable.
Development started on July 2010.

This project is (yet another) game project that walks in the line of Master of Orion, Imperium Galactica, Galactic Civilization, etc.
You can control many planets and ships, make war or peace with your neighbors, explore the galaxy and so on, in a turn based world !

One of the key feature of this project is procedural generation of content. Currently, there is no hardcoded galaxy data : everything is created randomly (yet in a reproducible way).

I'm planning on doing a pure 2D game (fits well to that kind of game), so I'm using SFML as graphics library. Because it relies on OpenGL for rendering, the whole game is completely portable to Linux and MacOS.

To speed up development, I use some part of Frost Engine's code base : the utils library, the GUI library, the input library and the XML library.

Just like Frost Engine, this project is still in alpha stage. Although less ambitious, I spend less time on it than I do on Frost Engine, so it's growing slowly.

There is no available demo right now, but source code is available online thanks to Sourceforge, at the following address : click me (SVN repository).

Here are the very first screenshots :

1. The start menu
2. The galaxy configuration screen
3. The player configuration screen
4. A typical, average elliptical galaxy (random generation)
5. ... and with its constellations (random generation too !)
6. A ring galaxy (experimental)
7. A solar system (WIP)

I found the time to play with this project recently, and came up with this :

As always, everything is procedurally generated (except planets graphics, there are only 5 or 6 in the directory, and the program randomly chooses which one to assign to each planet).
A star has, on average and with default gameplay values, 3 planets orbiting it.
In the game, planets won't move around their star. That's completely unrealistic, but probably better for the gameplay. Maybe I'll find something suitable later, and allow them to move, but for now that's not planned.

Next step will most likely be to implement ships and the turn based system. Actually, time is not handled for now ! Everything is perfectly still... Hopefully that'll change soon

Edit : I just implemented a rendering system that replaces pretty sprites by icons when an object is too small. Icons have been done quickly and may be replaced later, but I'm quite satisfied of the result !
As you can see, there are ship icons (little ones in the center) : the Ship class is here, but all the work still has to be done.