The Ruler of the Galaxy Forums are relocated at http://forums.delphiforums.com/ROG1.

With my studies consuming most of my time, I simply don’t have the time to work on ROG anymore. In addition, I do feel that ROG lacks the features to distinguish itself from other recent high quality games of the genre. (and even more so with the ‘looming’ release of MOO3) As such, I have decided that ROG project in its current form should come to an end. However, this doesn’t mean that I’m simply going to trash all the work spent on the it, quite the opposite. I’m already planning an online-only space strategy game incorporating many of the elements found in ROG. All the actual code will be rewritten from the scratch however, and most likely in some other programming language than Visual Basic.

And then some initial information about this new project: (I’m currently referring to it as Ruler of the Galaxy Online, but that may well yet change) It will be online only with (almost) everything played out in real-time with huge persistent galaxies. It will have features that balance out things between super-advanced races and those who have only recently discovered FTL travel. (i.e.. newbie players) Since the project is still deep in the planning stages and it will be a while before any actual coding is done, I’m not going into more details yet. However, I’m going to update this homepage with more details someday soon, so please check back later.

And last but not least, I have decided to release one more build of the original ROG as a public release. It’s by no means feature complete or bug free, but it’s a nice demonstration of the current state of the game. Unfortunately it will also be the last version of ROG released (unless there are some bugs catastrophic bugs) and it will be a while before Ruler Online will be ready to enter testing stages.

My actual studies have finally started, and as I was expecting, they are taking quite a lot of my time. Anyways, I have finally had a chance to spend some time working on ROG too, and I will try to get a new version out ASAP.

ROG Beta 0.140 is finally out! Featuring the brand new DirectX 8.0 support and lots of other new features, this is one of the most important ROG releases to data. This is also a great move towards the public beta, which should be out in late may or early june. All registered beta-testers should head to the Beta Center and grab the installation package, but make sure you read the instructions there first, because the distribution packages have been reorganized. And if you are not yet a betatester, but want to become one, fill out the Beta Application form!

The new beta (0.140) should have been out already, but some new features required a lot more work than intended, and I decided to finish them before releasing the beta. Some of the planet textures still require little work (and I have to do it myself, our artist is too busy with school) and the new Planet Listing routines became quite complicated as well. Anyways, the next beta will be out before the weekend, and after that I can start working on the bug fixes and missing features still needed before ROG is ready for a public beta release.

The planet pictures are now being rendered in real-time 3D, and even though it’s not perfect yet, the new system is FAR superior to the old one which used pre-rendered frames. (it’s very smooth and a lot easier to work with too) The performance loss is also quite minimal on any modern system, even though the initialization of Direct3D slows down the startup a bit. I’m going to release the next version quite soon, but first there’s some work to be done with the planet textures, because some of them require little modifications before they can be used with the new system. Our artist is also working on higher resolution textures, but they won’t be added in until later. Unfortunately, because of this new direction in development, I haven’t been able to work with the core engine very much, so the public beta will be somewhat postponed. Anyway, it will be released as soon as possible, which will most likely mean sometime in May.