Heaven & Earth 2 Source Code

[Solarion]

Universe seems to have died off or disappeared some years back. Can't find it available anymore. Couldn't find any evidence the 2.0 release ever made it out the door.

Is the Heaven and Earth sourcecode still available?

It would be a great community resource. Lots of places it can be placed on the web and shared for free nowadays...

Here we are a year later and this thread seems to have died. So after reading all this stuff, I'd have to agree with david.wendelken above and I'd have to just copy his question here.
Anyhow it would be nice to have even if to just tinker with the code and see what happens.

 

[savage]

H&E

I was asking about this earlier this month (Aramis, DonM, Hemdian...). Hemdian had it because it was suppose to go into Universe 2. He also mentioned it had a Out of Business vendor making recompiling difficult. Would've been nice to fix the printing and a couple other things.

Hemdian? Any updates?

Did anyone else get it?

 

[Hemdian]

Hemdian had it because it was suppose to go into Universe 2. He also mentioned it had a Out of Business vendor making recompiling difficult. Would've been nice to fix the printing and a couple other things.

Hemdian? Any updates?

I haven't been spending a lot of time on this to be honest. I'm already stretched too thin on my other Traveller projects. But I think I may have tracked down the original developer of the third party component (or at least where he was in 2008). I've sent an email ... we'll have to see if that gets a response.

 

[tancred]

Ack!
And here I've been hoping U2 was coming soon.
(I've been hoping for years, and haven't given up yet.)

Universe is fantastic, an absolutely invaluable resource for running a Traveller game.

The only drawback to it is having to run it in a Virtual PC under Win 7.
It works perfectly, but it's rather slow, at least on my machine.

I've never supported anything on Kickstarter (strictly limited gaming budget), but if there was one for Universe2 that would be the project that would make me sign up.

 

[savage]

updates

Thanks for the update.

I never saw U1, was holding out for U2. In today's market it would probably need to be stepped up. On a positive note
kickstarter is a good point. I would recommend 4 things;

• Move it into a website tool, without loosing functionality
• Partner with or use some of the other web tools
• support a 3d star map

Actually, I'd be happy with H&E printing changes.

 

[tancred]

...with bated breath

Any news on Universe 2?
Did you ever hear back from the vendor, Peter?

 

[Commander Truestar]

I know it's been a while...

Hi All.

I was about to start a mapping project and sparked up my H&E...
And I suddenly noticed the PBG data was not translating.

I'd have a system with a PBG of "304" and it would generate with one or two belts and no gas giants...

Then I tried to reverse it to "340" with the same data and it went into a loop re-requesting the PBG data!

Very bizarre.

So I was wondering if there was an update to this?
Or Universe?

 

[Hemdian]

Got a response from that third party component developer:

peter, its been so many years, i dont even know where the source code is. I surprised to hear its still around. i am curious, how are you using it? what product? company name? good luck to you.

alex lerner

So ... without this component, the H&E code can't be compiled as is. An investigation and rewrite of the relevant section(s) would be required to replace that functionality. Therefore no simple fixes or tweaks of H&E are going to be possible.

 

[Commander Truestar]

Got a response from that third party component developer:
An investigation and rewrite of the relevant section(s) would be required to replace that functionality. Therefore no simple fixes or tweaks of H&E are going to be possible.

What about a re-write from the ground up?
I know this is an extreme suggestion, but I would not mind trying it.
I'd need the existing project, to break down and potentially translate into java. I'd also use it as a project with which to teach myself java...so no guarantees.

But I'd try it.

 

[Hemdian]

Sure. You just need to get Stuart Fenris' permission (it's his code, I was merely granted a copy to help with my project).

 

[tjoneslo]

What about a re-write from the ground up?
I know this is an extreme suggestion, but I would not mind trying it.
I'd need the existing project, to break down and potentially translate into java. I'd also use it as a project with which to teach myself java...so no guarantees.

But I'd try it.

I started a similar project in java several years ago: https://github.com/tjoneslo/cartography

If you want to have a jump start, I'd love to poke ideas back. This won't compile currently as I'm trying to move from Ant to Maven. It also relies on old Java projects which are not updated any more, but should be easy to replace.

 

[simonh]

What about a re-write from the ground up?
I know this is an extreme suggestion, but I would not mind trying it.
I'd need the existing project, to break down and potentially translate into java. I'd also use it as a project with which to teach myself java...so no guarantees.

But I'd try it.

It's not H&E, but the source code for Star Base is fully open source. It's written in Python and fully object oriented, implemented on top of the Qt framework.

Personally I'd love to have some help with it.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Akeel]

Hi there

so four years on from the last post, has anything happened with the attempted recompiles and/or redevelopment?

I've been trying to run the original H&E under WINE on my iMac and it's just not having any of it and I've been hoping that someone out there would be able to make a version we can all enjoy, not just hot-shot programmers

please let me know what's happening

 

[Bad_Syntax]

I've wrote system designers for all the traveller versions. Nothing "finished", but all pretty much worked until the rules petered out. Some had maps and stuff.

I can code it, from scratch, in windows, no problem.

All except mapping the terrain on the planets, that part is beyond me, and I have tried

If somebody can help me with the algorithms to create the terrain on planets (no coding required), I can do the rest if enough folks wanted it.

But in short, no, I do not believe any progress has been made on this front. All to common to see projects start and die off as people's lives take precedence.

Bad Syntax

 

[simonh]

I've been hoping that someone out there would be able to make a version we can all enjoy, not just hot-shot programmers

I do provide a Windows executable for StarBase, so you don't need to install any technical developer stuff to run it. I've not actively worked on the project for a few years though.

Currently I'm working on a version for the iPad. I'd say it's about 50% done. World generation and most of the GUI is done, but the tricky part is working out the save formats and mechanisms so that I can add new features and keep everything backwards and forwards compatible.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Kilgs]

Wait... H&E can be brought back?

Honestly, anything would be awesome right now. Starbase is the only thing out there and it's quite good and simple. But it would be nice to have more options and the ability to copy, paste, import etc. (That's not a criticism... freeware rules!)

I'll say it again from the Universe II thread, there is no competition out there. Anyone who can gin up a good system is likely to be it.

 

[simonh]

I started StarBase when I was a Windows user at home and used cross-platform dev tools as a hedge against the future. However I switched to the Mac a while back but never could get StarBase working properly on the Mac. This is the primary reason I stopped working on it.

I'll re-visit that and see if nowadays the situation has changed. It's possible Mac support in the Qt library it uses might have improved in the last few years, but I don't have much time when I'm at home to work on it. That's mainly why I'm working on an iPad version as I can use my down time when travelling productively.

Simon Hibbs

 

[nobby-w]

Wait... H&E can be brought back?
[ . . . ]

With difficulty - It's written in VB6 which hasn't been supported by the vendor for 15 years and doesn't play nicely with modern versions of Windows. Sadly, VB.Net isn't 100% backward compatible - much to the annoyance of the maintainers of large bodies of VB6 code - so porting it to a modern platform is not a trivial undertaking.

 

[estar]

With difficulty - It's written in VB6 which hasn't been supported by the vendor for 15 years and doesn't play nicely with modern versions of Windows. Sadly, VB.Net isn't 100% backward compatible - much to the annoyance of the maintainers of large bodies of VB6 code - so porting it to a modern platform is not a trivial undertaking.

I have 20 years of experience with VB6 and several the applications I develop for are VB6. And they run under Windows 10 fine.

If I had the source code I can take a crack at it.

The main issue from what I understand is there is a third party image library that not supported anymore.

 

[Hemdian]

The main issue from what I understand is there is a third party image library that not supported anymore.

It uses an OCX called TwistedPixel. You can't compile the VB6 code without a developer's license. (I mean this literally, not legally.) I actually managed to track down the original developer of TwistedPixel (much to his surprise) but even he has lost the original code ... so no license file. Also, if you want to rewrite the TwistedPixel.OCX you'll first have to intuit what it does by how it's being used (based on examining the H&E source code calls).