Stars? Supernova

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skanks
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Stars? Supernova

Post by skanks »

what the hell ever happened to Stars! Supernova, anyway?

Jonathan
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Post by Jonathan »

Never going to happen.

They parted ways with their publisher and have been unable to locate another one. They have the beta version, but it's not feature-complete and it needs balancing. They don't have enough money to finish it. The brief flirtation with an angel investor turned out to be bogus.

http://www.starbasedelta.com/ubb/Forum8 ... 0338.shtml

The project is essentially doomed for financial reasons. The guys behind Gladiator wound up releasing their source a few years back to an interested community; perhaps Mare Crisium will wind up doing the same thing in another five years. That's probably the best one could hope for at this point. If they had decided to do a Stardock-style distribution back in '97, they might have been able to leverage their Stars! shareware revenue and make something happen. By 2000, though, that was probably all dried up.

There's not really an heir apparent to the throne. Stellar Legacy probably has the most developer activity of all the Stars!-wannabes. They have not released a playable version though.

http://www.stellarlegacy.tsx.org/

Galactic Civilizations was widely hailed as being much better than MOO3, but it is a single player only game. At the low end, most players are attracted to these web-based PHP strategy games which are popping up all over. Commercially, there doesn't seem to be anything on the radar at all.

Enter Hyades. Probably more ambitious than it has any right to be, it's designed to fill the gap between modern Homeworld-style games and old-school Stars! gameplay. Hyades really is not much behind Stellar Legacy; SL has spent their developer time working on a KDE frontend while Hyades has been more or less purely focused on the server. SL does have more active developers though and probably is going to come out with a playable version before Hyades does, so if you want a Stars! clone with more than 16 ship designs, check out SL, but if you want a space strategy for the new millennium, give Hyades a hand.
Last edited by Jonathan on Thu Aug 12, 2004 9:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Martin
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Post by Martin »

Speaking of shitty abandonware released as partially completed source, Golgotha is an interesting example. (See the interview with the project lead here.) It was released six years ago and has still not been developed into an actual product (stale sourceforge site here).

Jason
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Post by Jason »

martin? wtf?

Jonathan
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Post by Jonathan »

Here's some more crap I got off the rgcs newsgroup. None of this is Stars! Supernova. In fact, none of this is 4x space strategy.

http://www.nicelycrafted.com/todc/
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/d2/1.htm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mdestiny/index.html

This is more unreleased Stars! clones.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freestars/
http://starsclone.sf.net/

This guy has produced a big list of Stars! clones and similar games, all unreleased.
http://prokonsul.blogspot.com/2004/06/o ... makes.html

Here's a guy who's creating a super-secret 3d 4x space strategy with physics in Lisp.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&l ... .no&rnum=5

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