Hello my name is Jared

[DrUbVettiaer]

I am honored to join your community and thankful for your existence. I have lurked on your forums for nearly 2 decades.

I love the music of Chuck Barth and Outpost 2 will always be one of my favorite game soundtracks.

I bought Outpost 1 from a store when I was 12-13 and despite having the version that shipped broken, I was swept off my feet by it, it felt like now and the future at the same time. If I had not pressed CTRL+F1-F12 and found the unlimited resource cheat, I would have never been able to do much at all.

For a long time, I wanted to make the game work, and give it the treatment I felt it deserved. For the last 4 years I have spent a great deal of time working with Python. In September of last year I broke my foot and was stuck in a chair for six weeks. I finally felt like I had the time and skills to take on recreating this classic isometric tile space colony sim.

I have built most of Outpost 1, in Python using pygame, from the original assets.

Is anybody interest in seeing a development preview?

The economics need some work, but all the low level stuff is done except for Lab, Factory, and Warehouse building information window, many things need to be added, but it's pretty much filling in a JSON with the game data at this point.

Currently playable, no restrictions or checking construction requirements. Playable as 1.2. Watch out for 150 turn Seedfactory collapse.

If any on is interested I can provide a link to download.

Also is there a proper place to post about this project? It should be up to 1.5 standard by the end of the summer.


I am honored to be part of your community,
thank you for having me.

Dr. Ub Vettiar (aka Jared)

[Vagabond]

Welcome to the forums! I always enjoyed the Outpost 2 soundtrack as well but didn't know the producer's name.

I would be interested in seeing your progress on an OP1 port. Sounds like you have made quite a bit of progress. As for where to post about it, should be fine to put in the projects section of the forum

Brett

[DrUbVettiaer]

Thanks Bret! Appreciated your quick reply, love the community. Long term lurker, first time poster!

I will post it there, if you want to check out the preview you will need Python with pygame installed.

If you click on my profile, the like to my website is the link to the archive file contain the game.
or PyOutpost(Outpost 1 Python Port)
Unzip and run 'python outpost.py'.

DrUbVettiae

[Hooman]

Hello and welcome!

I would also be interested in seeing your game.

I would agree you should start a thread about the game in the projects section of the forum. In terms of providing the source, I find GitHub is an excellent place to provide that. Most of the Outpost Universe projects have moved to GitHub in recent years.

Speaking of which, if you wanted upgraded graphics for your game, or to avoid copyright issues with "borrowing" the originals, maybe speak to WhiteClaw or Leeor about using the OPHD graphics? Here are some relevant GitHub links:
https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/OPHD
https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/ophd-assets

[DrUbVettiaer]

Cool, I am not incorporated and am only sharing a passion project, and am not working competitively in the original market of the game, and the nature of this project's intent is educational/public. It is a port, and I would happily give to the copyright holder. There is no unique code in the project, almost all recipes for functions were taken from stack exchange.

I have studied the DMCA and will tread carefully, if this does not work for the community, let me know and I will politely take my leave.

I do not take money from anyone, and do not run ads on any sites I run.

Much respect to the work done on the Outpost HD project.

[Hooman]

Well, GitHub is free for open source projects, and open to random individuals.

If you're concerned about copyright, you can split the source and assets into separate repositories. You can put the source on GitHub, which I assume you're largely responsible for, so is fair game to do whatever you want with it. For the assets, I suppose I should encourage people to respect copyrights. When other people are "borrowing" assets for open source projects, they'll often distribute the code or compiled packages separately from the assets. That way the part they wrote remains "clean", so to speak.

Actually, OPHD has the code and assets split into separate repositories. Though the assets were all completely redone by WhiteClaw specifically for OPHD, so no worries about copyright issues there.

[DrUbVettiaer]

I run my own git server, but currently am not using version control beyond copying the project folder to a new folder with an incremented name every now and then, hell I don't even use an IDE.

With it being in python, I avoid all issue associated with compiling, and pygame is actually usable now that they updated to SDL2.

When I release it, I may create an asset installer for downloading assets, and encourage users to own the game if they use it, haha, I could include basic DRM to prevent it from running if you don't have one of the valid outpost.exe files, sorry MAC users that bought the game. Wait, that would be easy to code, and would give some suggestion that the person actually owns the game... Haha I'll just encrypt all the assets using the CRC for outpost.exe. 1. pop open a file chooser dialog, 2. have the user navigate to location of outpost.exe, 3. scan the CRC of the file they choose, 4. check against a list, 5. and decrypt the assets if the CRC is valid. And the lack of the expectation of real security, like buying something online, I could do the "encryption" and "decryption" in very lazy ways. Just a thought... I just had...

As far as hosting and distributing it, I will host it on my website, and my git server. Microsoft buying github has not made feel more confident in the site(though I do have an account https://github.com/J216), and I already have the infrastructure to do it, so not a huge effort.

Thanks for your feedback on this, this has been a pretty lonely path prior to now.

[DrUbVettiaer]

Well this is a dark day. I wrote a basic DRM system for Outpost 1, I need to collect all hashes for valid versions of Outpost binary.
Pretty sure I swore I would never write DRM, if I didn't I meant to. Anyways here it is. It can be used on any platform with post validation command.

Python DRM Rudiment
https://192.155.95.198:5000/static/drm.py

And a storm hit just as I am posting this...
Update::
The storm knocked out the power as I posted this, I am now running on battery backup.

[lordpalandus]

Clicking on that link shows a bunch of python code, as if it is a text file read in Google Chrome.

Clicking on the link in your thread for PyOutpost, causes nothing to occur. I click open in new tab and it auto-closes.

Not sure how you expect people to test it out...

EDIT:

Right clicking and hitting "Save Link", causes it to "download", but Chrome is telling me that it couldn't be downloaded securely. Only time I've gotten that message is when it detects a virus in the download.

[DrUbVettiaer]

It is a direct link to the file, right click on it and click save as.
Edit::
I don't use https so chrome will yell about it not being secure, what it mean is, from point to point the file is sent as plain text and a malicious person in between you and the server could SEE the contents of the request, I don't do eCommerce I don't need https,
Also text files don't really carry risk of virus, as they are never executed, sorry for your past bad luck with viruses. Scripts blockers have helped a lot for me.

Three people have been able to download it so far and run it, maybe it's a Chrome thing.

[Hooman]

I also noticed choosing open in a new tab cause the new tab to auto close with no download. I copy/pasted the link to a new tab and it downloaded fine though. Rather curious behaviour that I'm not used to seeing.

I imagine the security warning was more about HTTP versus HTTPS rather than anything malicious.

I would encourage use of HTTPS these days, for even simple non-security conscious purposes. For one, it helps rankings in Google, which a while back began to penalize non-HTTPS sites. For another, it helps with plausible deniability when you do need to do something security aware. If everything is encrypted, then nobody knows what traffic is security sensitive versus simple uninteresting normal traffic that just happens to be encrypted because that's the new default.

Anyway, if you're doing open source, I would still recommend GitHub. They do a pretty good job at helping with distribution. That's true of both the source code and any compiled release packages.

[DrUbVettiaer]

So crazy thing, I will likely never promote my site in search engines. I have done web analytics and SEO for years. And I never want to do something because of Google or AdSense again.

And also the site is effectively a static site for my projects, and users will never send any of their data to the site, just download regular files. I have zero interest in search engine traffic. I do not plan on registering a domain either. I have carried a domain for years, and at the end of the years an IP address would be just as good. I am not looking for the mass appeal, so much as being able to point people to my projects. And I understand some people will shift uncomfortably in their chairs seeing a link that is HTTP at an IP.

I am sick of doing things for traffic, traffics that if Google makes an internal change that you are unaware of, and suddenly denies you all your traffic and you may never know why.

I am not a professional and I am not trying to make money or get respect(or get a tech job), that keeps the pressure off and stops the validation chasing, and in general, makes the whole thing more fun for me.