Chronos

Chronos patch v1.2

Posted on by Luke Pammant

Loyal beta testers,

I want to first start off by saying THANK YOU so much for taking the time to play/test Chronos. Your feedback has been invaluable to the development of Chronos and I will continue to strive to build the game that YOU want to play.
In an effort to level the playing field I have wiped the database clean, ready for a fresh start. Everyone will start back at level one and you will need to re-create your accounts (sorry! I will try to find a better way of doing this in the future).
Some key features to this patch:
  1. New movement system based off of Fuel/Instant Warp.
    • You will notice a Green/Red bar to the left of your captains portrait that will indicate how much Fuel you currently have.
    • If you have enough fuel to instantly warp to your destination it will use the fuel and you will instantly be teleported to the location. Otherwise it will use all the fuel you can to get you as close as possible and then being the normal travel speed after that (30 seconds per unit)
  2. Scout Probes
    • Right click on a location to bring up the menu and click on “Deploy Scout Probe” this will send out a scout probe for 100 metal that will reveal the surrounding area. These scout probe move much quicker than your fleet (5sec/unit) and reveal a large area surrounding it. You can click on the “Radar Range” button at the bottom left to reveal the borders of your radar (you may have to zoom out to see them)
    • Scout probes only last for 24 hours so be sure to use them wisely
  3. Timers to indicate movement time.
    • These timers will count down to the completion time of the ‘Warp’ for the fleet or the deployment of the scout probe
  4. Several other bug fixes have been rolled up into the patch as well. I will post some specifics on the forums if anyone is interested.
As always, please keep in mind that this is a Beta (perhaps just a late Alpha even) so there are plenty of bugs! Please feel free to email the bugs to me directly or report them on the forums over at www.lukepammant.com/forums. You can also post suggestions/requests here.
Thank you all, once again, for your patience and for taking the time to play Chronos! Now get out there, man your battle stations, and conquer!
Sincerely – your benevolent, magnificent, omnipotent creator of the universe,
Luke

First patch to Chronos

Posted on by Luke Pammant

Last night I was up wee hours patching Chronos. I had fixed many bugs, added features, and re-structured some of the base level classes. As with any patching process I tested and tested until I was certain everything would go well. I apparently was mistaken…

When performing the data migration I over looked the fact that on my local development machine I was rebuilding the database every time I made a change. This cause an issue do to the “re-structuring” part that I had mentioned above. Long story short – I had to go through the database and find the missing bits of information that was not accounted for in the migration and fix it myself. I also had to re-link several foreign key relationships.

Lesson to learn here:

  1. Do no count on Entity Framework Code First Migrations for everything. While this tool is amazing it would be worth taking a look into how it works and adding custom code to do the re-linking upon deployment
  2. Deployment late at night can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Good thing is that no one was playing when I broke everything! Bad thing is that I was up late fixing silly mistakes.

 

New features added to Chronos

  1. Player based leader boards
  2. Structures that can deal damage and participate in defense of asteroids/planets
  3. Personal allegiances and enemies
  4. Ship prerequisites. (i.e. You need a level 2 hanger to build a bomber, etc.)
  5. You are limited to the amount of asteroids you can have by your player level. One asteroid per level, one planet per 5 levels.

That sums it up for now. Patch notes can be found on the Chronos Forums. Stay posted for more updates on Chronos!

Chronos Beta is up!

Posted on by Luke Pammant

ChronosTitle

Hello everybody! It’s been a very long time since my last post. I have been busy programming a browser base resource management game. Think Clan Wars meets Kings Age meets OGame but in HTML5/JavaScript on the client side and C#/MVC/EntityFramework on the back end.

At long last I have a beta of Chronos up and running!

I mostly took this project on as a personal learning experience since I had recently been promoted in my day job to a developer and honestly didn’t know the first thing about development!

The game has come a long way since my first alpha test and I feel that it is now a playable Beta. I would appreciate any questions/comments/critiques! There is a lot more that I would like to do with it but the first thing that needs to be done is to make it FUN! Please feel free to post on the Chronos Forums. I will be updating the forums regularly with bug fixes and features. I will also make an attempt to update this blog seeing as how Chronos is basically my life outside of work.

You can sign up and play the Chronos Beta at http://chronos.vitalsigns.biz.