I and the other EV: Darkstar developers decided, on my suggestion, that EV: Darkstar was too large to successfully complete as planned, and, in fact, the plan was so large that it would have been less fun to play. I had been having difficulty getting motivated about the project and the amount of work left to do was still very large. Before suggesting anything, I decided to get back into the fun part of programming, and so I made a one-system, one-ship, five-spaceport TC in around 3 days, using resources that I already had for Darkstar, as well as resources donated to our project from Ragashingo and Nick Anderson that were originally intended for Aftermath. Already having a large library of resources to pull from, the work was far more fun and far easier than what I had been doing.

I suggested to my team that we expand, bit by bit, on this "new" TC -- basically shrinking the Darkstar project down. We agreed to do this, and over the past four weeks (today completing the fourth week) it has expanded (or shrunk, as it still is basically the Darkstar project) into a TC of around 15 systems with around 25 spaceports, and a number of ships, outfits, missions, etcetera - all with graphics, descs, and bug testing pretty much handled.

The backstory has changed, and so the name has changed with it. So, basically, this post is just letting you know about a name change for Darkstar and just to expect something slightly different than what was expected before. The new name is "Acheron".

As you can see:

Good plan!

Awesome menu screen.

Kind of reminds me of what I've had to do for Colosseum: shrink it from its initial ambitions due to lack of motivation. So, like Trowel, I agree this is a good plan. Do whatever you need to do to get something solid and complete.

Thanks, both of you

Yes Josh, it was actually your doing that for Colosseum and your pointing out in some other thread how much greater it is to have something solid and complete than something larger but shifty and incomplete that, I think, inspired me to do this in the first place.

Great! Awesome! Radical!

Just checked out the screenshots on your forum. Utterly wonderful.

Welcome to the land of "Let's Just Add One More Thing" recursion, though. :laugh: Any specific plans on when or how to break out of the cycle?

Very cool! I've been looking forward to EV Darkstar for a long time.

@dr--trowel, on Oct 31 2007, 01:41 PM, said in Acheron - Child of Darkstar:

Just checked out the screenshots on your forum. Utterly wonderful.

Welcome to the land of "Let's Just Add One More Thing" recursion, though. :laugh: Any specific plans on when or how to break out of the cycle?

I'm doing my best to make it releasable at any point in development. Every time I add anything, I make it fit with everything else as much as possible and not necessarily fit with anything that isn't there. Heck, I could release it right now, but it'd be sorta boring. Hopefully I won't fall into that recursion, though, as it is still possible. If I do, I hope to do it by doing one major release with all of the "let's just add one more thing" things as plugins.

I recognize that ship. Isn't that your scoutship model? That thing was awesome.

Yes, it was. It became the basic shuttlecraft-ish ship though; although there is a scoutship variant.

Hmmm, perhaps the future of Nova TC's aren't in huge, 700 system plugs, but rather small-medium projects?

I was actually contemplating just yesterday what the point of the majority of total conversions are.

A good deal of TCs could have the same point delivered within existing universes -- stock stuff might need to be modified to an extent, sometimes, but that's still easier than redoing everything.

Your TC is supremely awesome. The graphics inspire me to want to do better. That said, every TC could use that little bit more...

Are you already implementing a level up or two-name system? If not, are you interested? Maybe not in the two-name system, because that would require rewriting descs, but the level up system can be introduced with almost no pain. Heck, it could work in stock nova, probably. Interested? I can give more info if so.