Antares game blog: initial post

Hello there. I've finally decided to make a blog for the game I'm developing, though it's still in very pre-alpha state. It is open-sourced and you can download the latest version here. It is written in Java so you can run it under Windows, Linux or Mac. It needs Java 1.6 at least to run. As it says in the summary,
"Antares is a 3D game of trading/space combat, in the line of Elite or Frontier. Some things you can do travelling with your spaceship include trading of goods, piracy, smuggling, mail delivery, different kind of missions..."

If you have any suggestions or discover any bug, feel free to post at the project forums

Current version is 0.0.0.2. It's only a few MB, though it doesn't include music files (version 0.0.0.1 did include music files, but it was 162 MB) The next version will have the music files in a different zip so it will be optional to download it.

Currently you can do these things in the game:

- Navigate through the vast of the outer space (well, only in a star system that includes only a star, a planet and a test object) with your test ship. There is already the free navigation mode, the assisted mode and the autopilot.

- Land in the planet (or crash if you are not careful enough), and take off.

- Collide with the test object.

Other features currently in the game:

- OpenGL graphics (basic ones, no shaders are planned)

- Support for music in Ogg Vorbis format (.ogg)

- 3D cockpit (you can look around) with buttons, multi-functional displays (MFDs) a head-up display (HUD) and a radar.

- A galaxy of a hundred thousand million star systems.

- Each star system has planets and moons generated pseudo-randomly with a (I hope) good scientific background.

- Planets and moons surface textures are generated on the fly with a third-party noise-based texture generator software.

Though I've already written the code that generates the planets, you can't still navigate between star systems. This will go in the next version.

Oh and no, it won't be multiplayer.

Well that's all for now, don't forget to post at the forum and feel free to contribute with music or sound effect files (in any format), spaceship designs (just drawings or 3d models) or any idea you have.

Screenshot time.

This one is from the 0.0.0.2 version:



In this one you can see the planet and the star:



This is a close-up of the planet surface:



This is an image of the version in progress. The planet has no texture yet but you can see the orange coloured planet because the star is a red one. You can also see a satellite mark selected in green to the left and other planet's marks around (the star and planets have a randomly generated name):



The planet and the satellite together:



And another view of the planet, it's satellite and the red star, wich is actually a close binary: