Space Pirates And Zombies

[Tycow]

Yo yo peoples... time for another indie gaming update.

 

I'm currently playing through Space Pirates and Zombies... it's a bit of an odd game that has got me slightly captivated with it's charm.

 

Basically SPAZ is a top down 2D rpg/shootathon that follows the adventures of the Clockwork, a mothership run by a ragtag band of survivors. You have to survive by mining resources, upgrading your ships with new blue prints and components found on your travels. You have to get by by doing randomly generated missions for the iron fisted military or the helpless civilians. Do you join sides in and help oppress the masses, or help them fight for their freedom (or even worse, sit back and watch them duke it out only to scavenge the remains?)

 

The sectors in the universe are randomly generated at the start of the game, and each sector has a number of items to explore.

 

People on the forums have likened SPAZ to being a spiritual Star Control 3, which IMO is a good thing. It's currently in beta, and you can preorder it (giving you beta access) via Impulse.

 

Words from the Website:

OVERVIEW

Space Pirates and Zombies takes place far enough in the future that Earth has become a toxic backwater planet, so potentially not that far in the future. The galaxy has been colonized by humans, and the only means to travel to new star systems is through highly restricted and well defended warp gates. It is well known that systems closer to the galactic core become richer and richer as well as more scientifically advanced. This has led to theories of a secret system with a cache of treasure or knowledge at the galactic core feeding this growth. As a pirate, you must assemble a fleet and discover what treasure awaits you there.

 

THE GALAXY

There are hundreds of stars to visit in SPAZ, and each game galaxy is uniquely generated.

 

STAR SYSTEMS

Within each star system there is an ecosystem of events that are influenced by your actions or lack of action. These events will expire over time and represent a War between the factions within the star system. Some events you can even stay out of the way and simply observe, such as fleet battles, and then collect the spoils. Yarr.

 

FACTIONS

Each system has two factions you can interact with, but they always dislike one another. The hub of activity in each system for each faction is their Starbase. There you can purchase technology, or trade captured crew for resources and other favors. If a faction is not friendly with you, they wont deal with you, but transferring a few workers to the Starbase can usually grease the wheels just enough. Approaching a hostile Starbase to make the trade is another matter entirely.

 

THE FLEET

As the game progresses, you increase the size of your mothership and thus the size of the fleet which it can maintain. Only your mothership is able to breach the warp gates between systems. The player can fly any of the ships in the fleet real time with AI pilots as wingmen. New ship designs are added to the fleet through combat. Each time a ship is destroyed, some of the knowledge to build that ship becomes available. If you can kill it, eventually you can fly it.

 

SHIP DESIGN

As the player explores star systems, they will come across new technologies to purchase.

 

Upgrading your ships to use the latest tech is always desirable, but can be expensive. Technologies are usually not

[The Veteran]

Wow, that's the laggiest experience I've ever had in my life... Are you running some kind of supercomputer Tycow cos I have a pretty powerful rig here and it couldn't even handle this simple game on the lowest detail settings!!! I could've probably lost myself in a fun lottle title like this but I guess indie developers don't have the ability to carry out in-depth compatability tests so I'm not going to grill them for it! Of course that's me assuming that incompatability it the issue, maybe it's not but there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to at least play this game without stuttering when I play every other title I own on maximum settings.

 

Go figure Looks fun though, if a little simplistic. I guess that's what they were going for by the sound of what's said on the site so they did a good job, personally I'll stick with bigger dev houses for my space pirating thrills though

 

EDIT : Tycow what's your average loading time to go from looking at windows to being IN a game playing? For me it seems to be about 10 minutes. Please tell me that's just my configuration and it's not actually that bad?!

[Tycow]

Hmm... that is a bit odd mate! What are your specs? You're right in that the game takes a bit to start up as it preloads common assets before the game starts to speed up going from planet to planet and system to system, but 10 minutes sounds a bit long...

 

Lemme go time!

 

OK - it took my laptop (2.2GHz Centrino2, nvidia 9600MGS, 3GB of RAM) 2m 39s to go from staring at the Windows desktop to being in my save game and flying around.

 

(PS - stick with it, while it looks simplistic, I assure you it is quite deep. The randomly generated missions, the faction systems, the ability to spec out your own ships etc... so much good going for it!)

[The Veteran]

Sadly it's not going to be possibel for me to stick with it under the current circumstances but I agree it deserves a better chance than I've been able to give it. It certainly takes my computer more than 3 minutes to do that first bit of loading and even the second shorter load took closer to 2 minutes than 1!

 

As an example at just how long the first load has been taking, I managed to tidy the whole downstairs of my house the last time I tried it. That includes picking up 2 trainsets, lego, magnetic letters, sponge letters, a bike, a car, crayons, shoes, books and who only knows what else. Not my mess you understadn

 

So yes loading is a BIG problem for me but the bigger issue is the ingame lag. Everything stutters from the mouse to the menu! When flying in a straight line it's just about bearable but when trying to alter direction or use any of the interface it's just impossible. Honestly I haven't played into GTAIV EFLC because of the memory leak it has on the pc but it still runs better than this!!!

 

Embarassingly I can't tell you my exact specs but I know they're pretty good as I've been able to max out every game I've ever bought on this computer and that includes the newest generation of recent releases. I have at least a dual core 2GHz+ processor a 1GB GPU that's only about a year old (from release) and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. I want to upgrade my CPU, mobo and RAM as the newer games are starting to tax it a bit but the fact is they still run fine! So how can that setup being giving me such issues???

[Tycow]

Sadly it's not going to be possibel for me to stick with it under the current circumstances but I agree it deserves a better chance than I've been able to give it. It certainly takes my computer more than 3 minutes to do that first bit of loading and even the second shorter load took closer to 2 minutes than 1!

 

As an example at just how long the first load has been taking, I managed to tidy the whole downstairs of my house the last time I tried it. That includes picking up 2 trainsets, lego, magnetic letters, sponge letters, a bike, a car, crayons, shoes, books and who only knows what else. Not my mess you understadn

 

So yes loading is a BIG problem for me but the bigger issue is the ingame lag. Everything stutters from the mouse to the menu! When flying in a straight line it's just about bearable but when trying to alter direction or use any of the interface it's just impossible. Honestly I haven't played into GTAIV EFLC because of the memory leak it has on the pc but it still runs better than this!!!

 

Embarassingly I can't tell you my exact specs but I know they're pretty good as I've been able to max out every game I've ever bought on this computer and that includes the newest generation of recent releases. I have at least a dual core 2GHz+ processor a 1GB GPU that's only about a year old (from release) and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. I want to upgrade my CPU, mobo and RAM as the newer games are starting to tax it a bit but the fact is they still run fine! So how can that setup being giving me such issues???

 

Wow, that is a shame mate. I wouldn't like to point the finger at your computer, but if my lil lappytop can run it as smooth as butter (see the beta/demo video I posted above to see what the gameplay should be like) then I can't think what else it could be. While the game is a beta, it's pretty polished. :S

 

Have you upgraded your graphic drivers recently?

 

(PS - are you sure that isn't your mess? I would certainly be playing with lego if I had some right now! ;D)

 

Post us a dxdiag... I'll have a squint at it for you!

[The Veteran]

haha no the lego and such is all my son's mess! My mess never gets tidied away

 

And I know what you mean, it seems to be a problem with my hardware but it's absolutely out of the question that this indie title is more demanding than all the other titles I've been playing lately. Most recent conquest was DeadSpace which is a few years old now but ran beautifully with all the settings on max. Honestly, I've NEVER had a game not work on this computer before because it's not good enough. Only the opposite is true...

[Knan]

Heh. Not bad, though the combat isn't quite up to Star Control standards.

[Sunflash]

I gave it a run myself today. VERY interesting. My only gripe is I'm never going to get used to the whole 'left-right thrusters are reletive to the ship and not the view' thing. Ever see a ship dodge INTO a laser /every damn time/?

[Blorfy]

@Tycow

Hi, I am one of the devs, thanks so much for the nice write up. SPAZ has had almost no press, so any word of mouth really helps. I saw The Veteran was having a tech issue, so I decided to pop in.

 

@The Veteran

We have seen the problem you are having a couple of times before, and it is most likely your openGL driver actually being out of date. When you update your graphic card drivers, newer open GL drivers will usually be added, but some lap tops cards have kind of old drivers. You should be able to see your open GL version in the console.log file wherever SpazGame.exe or SpazDemo.exe is. I will paste the info from mine, so you can see what to look for.

 

OpenGL driver information:

Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.

Renderer: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Version: 4.0.10237 Compatibility Profile Context

 

If your version is < 3.0 there is a pretty big slowdown.

 

If this doesn't work, please drop by our forums and I will try to get SPAZ working for you. I quickly made an account here and didn't want to leave you in distress.

 

Sorry for the trouble,

Blorfy

[The Veteran]

Thanks for dropping by Blorfy, it's always great to hear directly from the devs so we appreciate it! I knew it had to be a compatability issue lol, feel bette now

 

Troublingly though this is my info from console;

OpenGL driver information:

Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.

Renderer: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series

Version: 3.3.10151 Compatibility Profile Context

 

So it's not fully up to date by the looks of it but it is over 3.0 and I'm having serious problems so not sure why that might be. I'll update it tomorrow and post any findings as it may be of use to others in the future as well, plus I'd like to get to grips with a proper game of SPAZ lol

[Sunflash]

Throwing them a dxdiag report would probably be the most help ya can at this point, just fyi.

[FireWarrior]

I'd take a look at your mouse drivers as well, I've had both mouse and audio drivers be the cause of some weird-ass issues over the years.

 

Enjoying this little title so far, much kudos goes to the great Biscuit for his WTF is - series. My PC basically tries to commit suicide when a ship blows up, but beyond that I have yet to experience any major issues, stick with it and it gets interesting (and yes, the load times are HORRIBLE here as well)

[Tycow]

@Tycow

Hi, I am one of the devs, thanks so much for the nice write up. SPAZ has had almost no press, so any word of mouth really helps. I saw The Veteran was having a tech issue, so I decided to pop in.

 

Hey Blorfy! No problems... just glad to have generated a bit of extra money for you guys.