Author: Bestark

It’s finally happened! Ray has been talking about setting up the spacetyrant.com domain for some time. When the project was started, he registered the domain name. The site has been up for a few days now, and contains a few articles describing the game. The actual game is still being served on port 9999 at ioresort.com Anyone interested in playing the game or programming the game should check it out!

Looking for a new challenge? A brave new universe awaits you. You’ll receive a shinny new corvette equipped to locate planets and a scooper to make trading easy. There’s a catch however. You might not be the only one seeking new riches! Conflicts over territory may arise. We’re accepting applications for new captains at telnet://ioresort.com:9999 and an experimental windows client to play it, is available for download here wintyrant.zip.

The universe for space tyrant is divided into 2 areas, the main galaxy and the outer galaxies. Main galaxy is 1/5 of the map, while the outer galaxies take up the remaining 4/5 of the map. There is one spaceport at a random location, every 2000 sectors which has a wormhole leading to the first sector of an outer galaxy. You’ll also find in the main galaxy a tradingpost in sector 1 and another one every 2000 sectors. These can be good places to stay early in the game before the other captains build figs, as these locations are protected by neutral figs.

The main goal of the game is to accumulate microbots (credits used to purchase upgrades, starbases and figs) by using the antimatter you’re given every minute to move your ship around and trade with planets and ports. The more holds your ship has, the more efficiently it can trade, and the more microbots you can make.

Upgrades can be obtained at the tradingposts located throughout the main galaxy. There you can purchase homing beacons, holds, tractor devices, combat systems or scanners which are briefly explained below:

Homing beacons can be picked up by ships when entering a sector. Once attached to the ship, they are powered by the eddies generated by the ship’s movement and will report back the location of that ship to beacon’s owner in real-time.

Tractor devices allow you to nudge ports and warp planets. You’ll need at least 3 to move planets, 4 to move a port or planet into a nebula, and 5 if you want to move port or planet out of a nebula.

Combat systems provide defensive and offensive capability to ships. They augment the defensive and offensive strenght of your ship’s figs not deployed. You’ll need at least 3 of them before your figs get an offensive boost on attack.

Scanners provide your ship with the ability to spot enemy ships. With one or two they only work passively but will detect ships in adjacent sectors. With 3 or more you can also actively scan blocks of 600, 1200 and 1800 sector blocks.

As the game approaches a playable release, I figured it was time to describe it a bit. Space Tyrant is an open source game following in the footsteps of SST and TLR. Unlike it’s relatives, it runs in memory and uses a model that permits things to happen in real-time. For example, a ship moving into your sector will immediately cause your display to show a ship has spotted you. At the moment, the game is only playable with telnet, but it doesn’t suffer from the difficulty of having to key in many numbers to move from sector to sector, as each sector has a single digit from 1 to 6 to allow movement. The real-time model affects everything including your radio, so when someone transmits a message, all online ships see that message immediately.

The universe is similar to SST and TLR, with a main galaxy in which all ships start. For every 2000 sectors, there’s a spaceport randomly placed that has a wormhole leading to an 8K galaxy with a random productivity boost. Equipment works a little differently, with most basic functions built-in, like autoscoop, planet locator. Ships currently start with 50 holds and have room for 50 more or one less for every piece of additional equipment up to 5. That’s were things are a little different. You have the option of purchasing tractor devices, combat systems and scanners. These devices add basic capabilities when you add one or two, but when you add 3 or more, additional capabilities kick in. So depending on what you want to do, you’ll need to make the decision of what kind of ship you’ll need: farmer, killer or hunter.

Current state of game includes combat systems, passive scanners and tractor device under development. You can buy them, but they don’t do anything yet 😛

Check it out at telnet://ioresort.com:9999