Stars Reborn

stars-reborn is a project intended to be a faithful reproduction of Stars! - a classic 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) 16-bit Windows space strategy game developed by Jeff Johnson and Jeff McBride circa 1996. This project is not endorsed by the original authors or publishers in any way.

The primary tenets this project are:

1. Create an open game. This means freely distributable, modifiable, and playable (cross-platform, modular, extensible).

   This first goal is in service to the idea that I (Brandon Arrendondo), want people to enjoy this game, learn from it, support it, and keep it alive.

2. Faithfully reproduce the original game. This means all of the mechanics of the original game must be reverse-engineered (discovered, documented, and implemented) and all graphical components recreated. Anyone familiar with the original game should be able to pick up this one and play it without missing any feature.

3. Enhance the original game in a respectful and non-intrusive way. Allow for a "Legacy" mode for those who prefer the original, but also allow for some of the known bugs and exploits to be fixed, as well as additional add-on capability to enhance and fix known micro-management issues.

4. Stand on the shoulders of giants and acknowledge the contributions of the people who have worked hard to make this possible. This includes previous clone efforts, people who have done analysis and documentation of the original game, and anyone who helps in some way to hit the finish line.

This clone is written in Python, with QT (PySide) as a graphics framework. Much of the data transfer is done in JSON with emphasis on modular components to allow for future extensions.

Though the original game has simplistic graphics and basic overall game-play, there are many complexities to it that make it a difficult game to imitate. As such, the developers of this clone are always actively seeking feedback and bug reports to improve the quality of this clone.

Requirements

stars-reborn at the outset is designed to be cross-platform. The game should run on any machine that can run:

• Python 2.7+
• PySide - a Qt Python library (for rendering the graphical interface)
• pyclipper - a Python polygon clipping library (for scanning calculations)
• jsonpickle - to quickly save and load Python objects (save games, etc)

Installation

TBD.

So far on Ubuntu, I have needed the following packages:

sudo apt-get install python python-setuptools python-pyside qt4-dev-tools
sudo apt-get install libgeos-dev
sudo pip install jsonpickle pyclipper

Useful Links

Information about the original game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!

Information about 4X games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

The current Stars! wiki:

http://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Stars! strategy guide:

http://stars.arglos.net/articles/ssg/ssg.htm

The Stars! article library:

http://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Article_Library

The Stars! community forum:

http://starsautohost.org/sahforum2/