SRE: Solar Regions Explorer

Interstellar strategic game:  players explore the galaxy and eventually come into conflict with each other.  Originated in a test case for advanced hacks of Xconq's terrain generator; evolved into the preferred test case for materials model 1.

All the terrain, including the structure of solar systems, is generated by Xconq's fractal terrain generator - partly just to prove how powerful that generator actually is.  The only changes I made were to add the "adjacent terrain connection" feature and fix a bunch of bugs found along the way.

Part of the idea of SRE is that I want players to have the experience of exploring the universe.  Most of the difficulty of the game comes from player versus terrain, rather than player versus player - and that's demonstrated by the fact that I've completely neglected to define combat rules and it's still a fun game.  At present the AI is pretty much helpless with this game, and that will probably remain true for a long time, because the rules pretty much absolutely require long-term planning, which is the AI's weakest suit.  But even without competition, and even taking into account that it's mostly a testbed for debugging the game engine, SRE manages to hold my interest and I hope will hold yours, too.

The name is a tip of the hat to Amit Patel's Solar Realms Elite BBS door game, which I used to run back when I ran a dialup BBS.

Current status

Included in official distributions, but not on the menu of games presented at startup; you must load the file solar.g manually.  It seems like every time I add a feature to SRE, I uncover a corresponding bug in Xconq, so if you obtain a recent version of the game file, you must use a correspondingly recent version of the game engine, and even then some things probably won't work.

This is the Xconq game project I'm most actively working on at the moment.

Currently known bugs

There may be other bugs, of course, and these get fixed and new ones discovered pretty often, but these are the ones I'm aware of that at this time are uniquely relevant, or especially annoying, with SRE in particular.

• Trouble with resuming ACP-independent construction after it's been interrupted. 
• Connection terrain (such as planetary orbits) vanishes at some magnifications in the Tcl/Tk interface - this one has turned out to be especially difficult, and probably will remain broken for a while. 
• -1 (movement disallowed) feature for zones of control is documented but not implemented - SRE currently uses a workaround. 

What's next

• Fix existing bugs
• Images for all unit types.  I'm trying to use real photos, and ones that I can use without copyright worries, and that and the issues involved in turning them into GIF files makes it a slow process. 
• Fun help text, and help text at all - read the current help for "neutronium stations" for an idea of where I want to go with that. 
• More interstellar ship types, including support for hyperwarp along those interesting cyan corridors that currently litter the galaxy
• Make black holes bite back a little more
• Combat in general
• Bonus facilities and weapons (such as planetary laser batteries, and neutrino-burst weapons)
• Rules to implement the Giant Space Leech and its life cycle
• Possibly other living natural hazards (I've got a vague idea of a Crystalline Space Virus)