You know when you read a review of a game that says that one part of the game, say the battles between spaceships, looks great and is tons of fun, but the rest of the game is kind of boring?
Gratuitous Space Battles is that part of that game, without anything else.
(And before I say anything else, note that there's a free demo.)
You pick a fighter, frigate or cruiser hull for each of your vessels...
...you kit them out with weapons and shields and engines and so on, you deploy an armada of ships of different sorts (or all of the same sort, if you like), and then you give them all orders. Concentrate all fire, prefer to shoot enemies that're already wounded, shoot this kind of ship over that kind, protect this ship of ours, protect any ship of ours that's damaged, stop at this range from the enemy and plink with your long-range missiles rather than charging into beam range, et cetera et cetera.
And then you click the "Fight" button, and sit back and watch.
For the actual battle - which is fought on a 2D battlefield, though ships can go over and under each other - you're a pure spectator. GSB is like a tower defense game, in that regard. (Many tower-defense games let you build new towers during a battle, though; GSB does not.)
You can speed up and slow down the battle, and you can zoom in and out. From a distance, the action looks like this:
(In this battle, I'm employing the Unsporting Crowd of Torpedo Frigates strategy. I'm also playing at full resolution on my huge monitor, so the full-sized screenshot is 2560 by 1600 pixels and rather a lot of kilobytes.)
Zoom in, and you can see...
...each individual weapon shot, repair drones patching flaming holes in hulls, and fighters weaving around the capital ships. (Full-sized screenshot here.)
When you win a battle you earn "honor" with which to unlock new hulls, equipment and the three whole alien races besides the one you start with, the Federation. (The big Federation ships, rather delightfully, all look like a hybrid of a Starfleet vessel and a Battlestar.)
It's all a lot of fun, and should become even more fun as the game expands. Cliff Harris, the indie developer of GSB and a few other games, is actively patching bugs and adding stuff, and GSB is also very moddable. Fans have already, according to the ancient tradition of the first few mods for any game, created a few rough-and-ready super-battleships by just adding more module mounting points to existing hulls. Some proper high-quality mods with all-new graphics, like unto the Babylon Project mod for Weird Worlds, should be arriving soon.
So try the free demo and see what you think. The full game takes into account what you've done in the demo, by the way, so you won't have to play the tutorial level again if you don't want to, and get to keep whatever honor you earned.
(GSB is Windows-only at this point, but because it's not a very demanding game it generally works fine on other OSes if you play it in an emulator.)
Gratuitous Space Battles is $US22.99 from the developer, or only $US20.69 on Steam.
Note that there's a graphical glitch in GSB that affects people who're using an unusually high horizontal screen resolution (so, one giant monitor, or a row of smaller ones). It...
...turns a column of screen to the right into stripey repeats of the last correctly-drawn column of pixels.
I think this was meant to be fixed in the recent patch, but it doesn't seem to have been. No problem, though; just go to the options and disable "Gratuitous Shaders", and with very little eye-candy reduction, the whole screen will draw properly again.
18 November 2009 at 10:28 am
Hi Dan,
What OS are you using for this? I really wanted to try this out, but only have (virtualised) Win7, and couldn't get the demo to run.
18 November 2009 at 10:50 am
This is still my old computer, so I'm using WinXP; I don't have a Win7 box here.
I think it should work fine on Win7, though; presumably it's some virtualisation oddity that's causing the problem.
Here's a forum-search that may help.
18 November 2009 at 1:13 pm
I was wondering why my screen was doing that on the demo, now I know thanks.
18 November 2009 at 3:49 pm
Must resist urge to buy... must resist...
oh bugger.
Since I read modding is fairly simple, I've already got some ideas:
Blake's 7
and
original Space Lego.
18 November 2009 at 5:10 pm
It is very good.
18 November 2009 at 5:36 pm
Dammit dan, i was hoping for some delicious high-res images but your main site is still inaccessible for us peons on Optus cable.
18 November 2009 at 5:42 pm
Yeah, I was wondering whether that'd be a problem. This very day, I have poked my Web-hosts about it again.
18 November 2009 at 6:22 pm
I'm on Optus cable in Ryde and havn't had any issues whatsoever with loading for the 2 months or so i've been here :/
18 November 2009 at 6:43 pm
Fortunately, the problem affects far from ALL Optus (and iiNet, as it turns out) users. This has made things worse for those affected, of course, because it's taken some time to figure out that there was actually a real overarching problem at all.
More about this in this post.
18 November 2009 at 10:36 pm
"Unsporting Crowd of Torpedo Frigates"
A favourite of mine, working well and cheaply with Rebels. Then came the online challenges... The "Torpedos just bounce off my armoured carapace" cruisers were a blow, but "These fighters kill five frigates a second" transforming my crowd into a continuous wave of explosions was awesome.
18 November 2009 at 11:46 pm
You can still beat pretty much everything with frigates-plus-fighters (which is actually what I was using in the screenshots :-). And, in a development that'd entertain Goonswarmers, ships that aren't even able to move can beat most scenarios handily (which I think is kind of what you're meant to do with the Empire's Weapons Platform "frigate").
Beefier guns for the bigger ships, and a probable whole new "Battleship" class above the cruisers, may change this.
19 November 2009 at 1:48 am
This reminds me of the impressive-space-battles part of Sins of a Solar Empire, but without all the enormously tedious micromanagement that comes with playing an RTS. Not that Sins is all that tedious to play - unlike some games (lookin at you, Starcraft) you can let your empire Do Its Own Thing and just generally steer fleets around and set the fighting tactics and let them engage the enemy at will. Also, Sins is a beautiful game that does a whole lot with very little, as far as hardware goes - crank the effects way down and play it on old crappy machines, and it'll still look good. You can zoom out or zoom waaaay out for that All Hail the God-Emperor tactical level of things, or zoom way in to get right in there with Red Leader. It's great fun after you get done going back-and-forth with the enemy and start really winning - whomping on a smaller fleet with five or six great big capital ships and umpteen dozens of aircraft carriers with a bunch of long-range missile frigates is great to watch. The capital ships are really just there for support though, for when you need to pummel a planet into submission after you've destroyed all the ships protecting it (only capital ships and siege frigates can attack a planet) - fighters and bombers from the carriers kick ass in huge quantities, because it takes forever to shift ships across a gravity well, but fighters and bombers can close the distance in seconds - I've seen entire fleets destroyed before even having the chance to engage any of the enemy ships, and the missile frigates are really optional at that point.
Before all that gets under way though it's pretty boring - explore planets, hope no one kills your pathetically thinly-spread empire before it gets off the ground, that sort of thing. I'll have to take a look at this Gratuitous Space Battles game, it looks like it'd be a lot of fun. All the flavor, none of the fat.
19 November 2009 at 2:14 am
Yeah - GSB isn't nearly as ambitious as a 4X game or RTS, but the return on time invested is excellent. It doesn't take very long to get through the standard battles, but the "Challenge" system lets you fight a new diabolical armada every time you come back to the game, so you won't be reduced to just fine-tuning the minimum possible price you can pay for a fleet to beat Battle 5 on Hard, or whatever.
(You get Honor points based on how much less your fleet cost than the "par" budget for the battle. You can't farm Honor, though; if you beat a battle on a given difficulty for 1000 less than the budget you get 1000 Honor, but if you then beat it with a fleet that cost 1500 less than the budget, you only get the 500-point improvement over your last personal best.)
There's also the odd Challenge that isn't a challenge at all, because the enemy ships all have one weedy gun and no shields or armour. But this makes them very cheap, so there can be dozens and dozens of them for your bemused spacemen to obliterate!
19 November 2009 at 6:00 am
Dan, your main site is now dead to those of us on top of the world. Dying at securewebs/bla again.
For your amusement.
$ traceroute http://www.dansdata.com
traceroute to http://www.dansdata.com (64.85.21.19), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 northbranch-air.enet.umn.edu (134.84.19.254) 0.800 ms 0.204 ms 0.238 ms
2 p1-20-64r.me.umn.edu (192.168.20.126) 0.838 ms 0.879 ms 0.711 ms
3 telecomb-cn-01-vlan-715.ggnet.umn.edu (192.168.11.138) 0.776 ms 0.862 ms 1.638 ms
4 telecomb-bn-01-v3710.ggnet.umn.edu (128.101.58.145) 0.812 ms 0.766 ms 0.919 ms
5 telecomb-br-01-v3719.ggnet.umn.edu (128.101.58.146) 0.997 ms 0.820 ms 0.776 ms
6 telecomb-gr-01-ten-2-3.northernlights.gigapop.net (146.57.252.178) 0.686 ms 0.725 ms 0.754 ms
7 amesia-gr-01-po-1.northernlights.gigapop.net (146.57.252.153) 10.113 ms 9.853 ms 9.591 ms
8 kscymo-gr-01-po-1.northernlights.gigapop.net (146.57.252.157) 10.284 ms 10.356 ms 11.587 ms
9 te-1-3-433.car2.KansasCity1.Level3.net (4.53.34.41) 9.812 ms 37.028 ms 10.063 ms
10 ae-4-4.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net (4.69.135.238) 23.064 ms 24.348 ms 35.744 ms
11 ae-2.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net (4.69.132.53) 56.051 ms 49.618 ms 52.584 ms
12 ae-23-52.car3.Seattle1.Level3.net (4.68.105.36) 50.312 ms 49.564 ms 49.464 ms
13 ge-0-4-sea-cr1.cet.com (4.71.152.174) 49.218 ms 49.707 ms 49.828 ms
14 ge-0-0-spk-cr2.cet.com (198.202.26.4) 63.884 ms 63.693 ms 63.324 ms
15 securewebs-gw.cet.com (198.202.27.27) 63.448 ms 63.714 ms 63.683 ms
16 fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com (64.85.23.2) 66.837 ms 67.484 ms 66.775 ms
17 * * *
^C
19 November 2009 at 9:09 am
In this price bracket purchase was a no brainer. I actually bought this before the official release, just for a bit of fun.
The price of games is so high these days that I can really see a big market for sub $30 games. Torchlight is another example that springs to mind, and World of Goo.
That said though, this has actually inspired me to go pull out Sins of a Solar Empire again.
19 November 2009 at 10:22 am
Dan,
For your second amusement. This time from TPG.
tracert http://www.dansdata.com
Tracing route to http://www.dansdata.com [64.85.21.19]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
---
4 115 ms 94 ms 119 ms nme-sot-dry-csw1-vlan-1.tpgi.com.au [203.26.28.1
]
5 152 ms 189 ms 242 ms 202.7.171.121
6 50 ms 25 ms 48 ms nme-nxg-wal-crt1-ge-5-1.tpgi.com.au [202.7.162.1
37]
7 164 ms 164 ms 151 ms syd-nxg-men-crt1-ge-3-0-0.tpgi.com.au [202.7.171
.141]
8 381 ms 443 ms 383 ms if-3-0.core4.SQN-SanJose.as6453.net [216.6.30.13
]
9 355 ms * 202 ms Vlan1280.icore1.SQN-SanJose.as6453.net [216.6.30
.26]
10 331 ms 325 ms 334 ms ix-2-0.icore1.SQN-SanJose.as6453.net [209.58.116
.14]
11 356 ms 358 ms 378 ms vlan69.csw1.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.18.62]
12 398 ms 194 ms 178 ms ae-62-62.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.69.134.209]
13 203 ms 197 ms 197 ms ae-7.ebr1.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.50]
14 195 ms 197 ms 194 ms ae-13-51.car3.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.4]
15 201 ms 213 ms 211 ms ge-0-4-sea-cr1.cet.com [4.71.152.174]
16 234 ms 227 ms 200 ms ge-0-0-spk-cr1.cet.com [198.202.26.1]
17 213 ms 201 ms 201 ms securewebs-gw.cet.com [198.202.27.27]
18 204 ms 208 ms 204 ms fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com [64.85.23.2]
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 ^C
19 November 2009 at 10:57 am
I tried again from home (different ISP obviously) and got the same final steps.
19 November 2009 at 10:58 am
I'm continuing to poke my Web hosts about this - I've had a couple more reports like the above ones just today, from people in far-flung locations (like Italy...), and I believe my hosts are starting to realise that this actually really does look like being their fault :-).
NOTE that I'm thinking about transplanting the connectivity comments from this page to the one that's actually about this problem, because I don't think poor Gratuitous Space Battles necessarily deserves to have this conversation cluttering its comments :-).
19 November 2009 at 11:19 am
OK, let me add a further-flung location:
I'm in northern Norway (ten ' away from 69°N) and I get:
14 194 ms 194 ms 195 ms ge-0-3-sea-cr1.cet.com [204.181.35.202]
15 204 ms 204 ms 204 ms ge-0-0-spk-cr1.cet.com [198.202.26.1]
16 204 ms 205 ms 204 ms securewebs-gw.cet.com [198.202.27.27]
17 207 ms 206 ms 206 ms fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com [64.85.23.2]
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
when I tracert http://www.dansdata.com .
19 November 2009 at 11:36 am
For those (few) who are interested, the demo appears to run fairly well on an aging pentium-M laptop with Intel graphics running Ubuntu Jaunty and wine. For some reason every time the screen is cleared it is first flipped top-to-bottom, and there's a rather nasty quirk with ships that can cloak (a big chunk of the top-left corner of the screen is some sort of area that's supposed to be off-screen). But the game is playable (although a 1280x768 screen is a little cramped - I couldn't zoom out enough to see the whole battlefield) in spite of being "Windows-only".
[I get garbage when it changes from one screen to another too. GSB by default uses Star-Wars-style (which is to say, vintage sci-fi-TV style) diagonal wipes between screens, and there's something wrong with how it buffers the first screen image, or something. This problem (which might, once again, be a result of Cliff not having as big a monitor as all of his users :-) is curable: Turn off "Screen Transitions" in the options and GSB won't try to use the fancy wipes any more. -Dan]
19 November 2009 at 12:10 pm
Same problem here in Canada
Tracing route to http://www.dansdata.com [64.85.21.19]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 11 ms 12 ms 19 ms 10.231.240.1
3 10 ms 10 ms 19 ms gw03.slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.90.145]
4 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms gw01.slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.93.193]
5 16 ms 16 ms 18 ms so-4-1-0.gw02.ym.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.83.198]
6 18 ms 19 ms 15 ms so-2-1-0.gw02.mtnk.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.80.134]
7 82 ms 34 ms 32 ms 69.63.248.89
8 58 ms 60 ms 58 ms so-0-3-2.mpr1.lga5.us.above.net [64.124.128.193]
9 62 ms 65 ms 63 ms so-0-2-0.mpr1.dca2.us.above.net [64.125.26.97]
10 63 ms 64 ms 61 ms xe-0-1-0.er1.dca2.us.above.net [64.125.27.25]
11 64 ms 64 ms 63 ms xe-1-1-0.er1.iad10.above.net [64.125.26.238]
12 63 ms 62 ms 63 ms xe-0-0-0.er2.iad10.above.net [64.125.26.234]
13 63 ms 62 ms 62 ms above-level3.iad10.us.above.net [64.125.13.234]
14 75 ms 89 ms 72 ms vlan69.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.17.62]
15 63 ms 67 ms 75 ms ae-62-62.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.145]
16 57 ms 74 ms 67 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.69]
17 56 ms 58 ms 59 ms ae-1-100.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.113]
18 98 ms 89 ms 90 ms ae-3.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.61]
19 119 ms 125 ms 125 ms ae-2.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.53]
20 122 ms 134 ms 120 ms ae-23-52.car3.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.36]
21 119 ms 129 ms 119 ms ge-0-4-sea-cr1.cet.com [4.71.152.174]
22 128 ms 127 ms 128 ms ge-0-0-spk-cr2.cet.com [198.202.26.4]
23 127 ms 128 ms 126 ms securewebs-gw.cet.com [198.202.27.27]
24 131 ms 136 ms 137 ms fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com [64.85.23.2]
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
19 November 2009 at 3:52 pm
http://www.spin.net.au - Still no love accessing dansdata.com
This game reminds me of a very old Star Trek TOS game, creatively entitled 'battle.exe' and, as all fine games are, DOS based.
I have searched the net high and low to find a copy of it. The concept seems similar to GSB here. Input instructions such as distance to travel, which weapons to fire and hit go.
Any help tracking this gem down would be greatly appreciated!
19 November 2009 at 4:06 pm
ping dansdata.com
Pinging dansdata.com [64.85.21.19] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 64.85.21.19:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)
*100% LOSER!*
tracert dansdata.com
Tracing route to dansdata.com [64.85.21.19]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 51 ms 51 ms 51 ms 203.23.236.34
3 52 ms 51 ms 51 ms core-syd-lns2.comcen.com.au [203.23.236.45]
4 52 ms 51 ms 52 ms vlan551.22rrc76f000.optus.net.au [59.154.10.17]
5 211 ms 211 ms 212 ms te-4-2.car2.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.79.42.229]
6 223 ms 216 ms 215 ms vlan89.csw3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.18.190]
7 223 ms 217 ms 231 ms ae-82-82.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.69.134.217]
8 235 ms 234 ms 235 ms ae-7.ebr1.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.50]
9 335 ms 235 ms 235 ms ae-13-51.car3.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.4]
10 230 ms 229 ms 229 ms ge-0-4-sea-cr1.cet.com [4.71.152.174]
11 241 ms 241 ms 241 ms ge-0-0-spk-cr1.cet.com [198.202.26.1]
12 243 ms 243 ms 243 ms securewebs-gw.cet.com [198.202.27.27]
13 246 ms 246 ms 246 ms fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com [64.85.23.2]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete. Securewebs SO SECURE THAT NOTHING GETS IN OR OUT.
19 November 2009 at 4:10 pm
I admit being just a tad disappointed that GSB won't run on my Asus N10 lappy - it is just the thing for mobile lappy gaming, but the minimum 768 screen height is a bummer.
19 November 2009 at 5:33 pm
Just bought it and loving it. Using the "swarm with fighters" strategy is good fun :D
And you can all blame me for the main site not working now - no sooner then I said mine is working fine it dies completely for me too now :(
19 November 2009 at 8:18 pm
Anne,
I don't think it's possible to zoom out to see the whole battle for anyone; I can't on my windows machine at 1600x1200.
Dan,
my only posted challenge, "Monocultural", is ten dozen cheap frigates, 'cos that's fun. I know it beats some styles, and fails badly at others.
And no-one's yet mentioned the two infinite battles, where you pit your fleet against endless sets of foes with varying approaches and see how long it lasts.
19 November 2009 at 8:21 pm
Thanx for the heads-up on the display bug. I was pretty peeved when it didn't work on my 4800x1200 Eyefinity setup. Now I can try again.
Interesting lessons i've already learned: Fusion guns are bad in knocking down shields, fighters with torpedos rock (I guess that's why there is a limited amount of pilots).
The next strategy I'm going to try: Bunch of heavy ships with no engines, but LOADS of missiles (the 1200 long range kind), and a few ships with nothing but armour, shields and a targeting laser. First wing stays all the way at the back, others get up close and try to stay alive till the missiles get there...
(This is one of the few games you can play pretty well while not at a computer)
And I can't reach Dan's Data either, both from home and from work, both in the Netherlands
19 November 2009 at 8:38 pm
I've just tried out the demo, and I have to say that it's pretty good fun. Just decided to buy it too. I've wanted a game like this for a while - I always pictured something in my head like Homeworld2 but with ship customisation similar to GSB).
OrgAdam, have you checked http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net ?
They (or other abandon-ware sites) might have what you're looking for.
Oh and Dan, Sure you've got it figured already, but I can't access your main site either (ISP is Aunix in VIC).
Also, I'm still curious: what's the word on your Vista machine and the slow data transfers?
19 November 2009 at 9:19 pm
Thanks Mak Elblotto, unfortunately... no dice! Clearly this one predates... er... the internet?
20 November 2009 at 12:20 am
To stay offtopic: http://www.dansdata.com is once again reachable from here. (and there was much rejoicing)
20 November 2009 at 12:21 am
Itsacon,
that should work. A similar idea is to have a lead/sacrifice ship, which you escort with most/all your fighters as a way of stopping them zooming off and getting killed while the rest of the fleet is still at the other side of the map. I leave that ship's equipment as an exercise for the reader.
OrgAdam,
"Battle" isn't on the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_games
An MS-Dos game that's just possibly actually what you're after called "Begin" is, and if that is it, then http://www.starfleetproject.com/ will make your day.
20 November 2009 at 1:23 am
I purchased this immediately when it was mentioned on Penny Arcade a while ago. I was all gung-ho to assist in the beta testing and give my valuable input. Instead I just played it a lot until Cliffy released the final version. The beta was a couple of dollars cheaper than the final and that's essentially what the game ended up costing if you bought early.
I sent Cliff an email essentially saying that I felt bad for just playing and not helping and could I pay full price as a way of saying thanks. He replied that I could certainly buy a friend a copy to make things right. ;-)
I believe I will do just that. Indie developers deserve all the help they can get. I can think of a few people who would enjoy this game.
If you read his GSB dev blog (linked from the main page) you'll see that he's still working on adding a lot of new stuff to the game. Well worth the buy.
20 November 2009 at 8:48 am
EYE-CATCHING HEADLINE
(I'll leave the off-topic routing discussion on this page for now, at least until the problem's solved, which I hope will be very soon.)
My Web hosts say the problem may now be solved, or at least changed. Could those of you who tracerouted and/or pinged, above, try it again, please? (You needn't paste in the whole results, unless fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com isn't the end of your successful traceroute steps any more.)
Or you can just see if your browser can see dansdata.com now, of course.
20 November 2009 at 10:37 pm
It seems your webhost screwed something up. Last week I could reach dansdata.com from germany without problems; today not so much.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Routenverfolgung zu http://www.dansdata.com [64.85.21.19] über maximal 30 Abschnitte:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms dslb-092-076-224-001.pools.arcor-ip.net [92.76.2
24.1]
3 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms 88.79.26.241
4 9 ms 9 ms 18 ms 88.79.26.81
5 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms 92.79.212.81
6 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms ffm-145-254-16-242.arcor-ip.net [145.254.16.242]
7 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 212.162.4.129
8 23 ms 21 ms 31 ms vlan69.csw1.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.68.23.62]
9 21 ms 21 ms 22 ms ae-62-62.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.140.17
]
10 112 ms 112 ms 112 ms ae-42-42.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.137.5
4]
11 129 ms 129 ms 130 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.69]
12 130 ms 139 ms 130 ms ae-1-100.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.113]
13 158 ms 161 ms 161 ms ae-3.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.61]
14 190 ms 180 ms 180 ms ae-2.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.53]
15 180 ms 180 ms 180 ms ae-23-52.car3.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.36]
16 178 ms 177 ms 178 ms ge-0-4-sea-cr1.cet.com [4.71.152.174]
17 184 ms 184 ms 184 ms ge-0-0-spk-cr1.cet.com [198.202.26.1]
18 188 ms 266 ms 243 ms securewebs-gw.cet.com [198.202.27.27]
19 190 ms 190 ms 190 ms fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com [64.85.23.2]
20 192 ms 192 ms 191 ms beechler.com [64.85.21.19]
Ablaufverfolgung beendet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some DNS fubar maybe? I don't think dansdata.com should point to beechler.com...
21 November 2009 at 7:57 am
No, that's just the shared server dansdata.com is on; if I traceroute from here to dansdata.com I get beechler.com as the last step as well, and I can see my site just fine.
I was, however, suspecting that a successful traceroute and being able to see the site were only strongly correlated, not always correlated, and this confirms that. (Can you ping dansdata.com?)
21 November 2009 at 9:36 am
Just for your information, I too decided to go on and buy it. Considering the amount of copies he must have sold thanks to your post, the author shoulld definitely offer you at least a beeer... :-p
21 November 2009 at 9:18 pm
Cannot ping your site.
Pinging dansdata.com [64.85.21.19] with 32 bytes of data:
Request eaten by Great Firewall of China.
Request intercepted and destroyed by Chuck Norris.
Request has left the building.
Request timed out, 15 minutes in the sin bin.
Ping statistics for 64.85.21.19:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)
22 November 2009 at 7:28 pm
Someone should explain to the well-meaning masses that ICMP is a regularly blocked protocol and missed TIME EXCEEDED packets are indicative of nothing more than an over-zealous network administrator.
22 November 2009 at 9:05 pm
Well, since my last comment I can reach your site just fine. No problems at all; ping or otherwise. Maybe it was just a hick-up on my ISPs end.
Sorry to have bothered you.
22 November 2009 at 9:21 pm
to cut a long story short
5 171 ms 169 ms 171 ms 203.208.190.149
6 170 ms 174 ms 171 ms xe-9-2-0.edge3.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.78.195.201]
7 172 ms 179 ms 179 ms ae-82-80.ebr2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.69.144.179]
8 183 ms 195 ms 183 ms ae-2.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.69.132.13]
9 200 ms 212 ms 201 ms ae-7.ebr1.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.50]
10 201 ms 201 ms 199 ms ae-13-51.car3.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.4]
11 201 ms 201 ms 201 ms ge-0-4-sea-cr1.cet.com [4.71.152.174]
12 208 ms 208 ms 210 ms ge-0-0-spk-cr1.cet.com [198.202.26.1]
13 209 ms 209 ms 207 ms securewebs-gw.cet.com [198.202.27.27]
14 210 ms 211 ms 210 ms fe-0-0-3-kf-br1.securewebs.com [64.85.23.2]
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
25 November 2009 at 12:03 pm
I'm giving the game a go, but I'm finding it extremely frustrating that I can't control the ships once the battle's started. It's already happened a good few times that I've screamed "NO! NO! WTF ARE YOU DOING!!!" to one of my ships that was doing exactly the opposite of what I wanted it to, and couldn't do anything about it.
So far, I feel that great potential for a tactical RTS has been wasted.
The game isn't bad, mind you, but it could have been so much more.
Kinda reminds me of Freelancer...
25 November 2009 at 3:38 pm
Here's another fun little 2D top-down space sim:
http://www.captainforever.com
It's not an RTS, and it's Flash based. You assemble your ship from parts salvaged from your opponents.