State of Profit

Hello and welcome!

I’ve been around here for a few years now but this is the first time I post in this section. The reason for the delay is that I did what we all advice people not to do, create an mmo as my first game. Not only is it my first java game, it’s my first java experience, and first game that took more than 60 hours to write (the old record holder was a simple VB6 game).

So, without further delay, I’m proud to present the first alpha version of State of Profit! Yes, it took me 4 years (next to my full time job and family) and it’s still only an alpha version…

It’s something like Transport Tycoon having a baby with a random MMO, with any FarmVille kind of game as its Godfather (transportation, mmo, simplicity). I have hundreds of things that I still want to put in (ranging from soundeffects to cartels (clans), research, airplanes and much more), but I finally completed it to a stage that is, almost, bug free and that can be classified as a game.

So, please, try it out and let me know if you run into bugs or quirks or anything else.

Registration is required as it’s an mmo but just type whatever for password (no email required, in fact, I don’t even store it if you fill it in), all passwords are double md5’ed in the db (md5 is a placebo, right Riven?)

Link: http://stateofprofit.com

http://stateofprofit.com/pictures/screenshots/airplane.png

Introduction to alpha version 1.4:

RDW2FpxPpOw

Feedback from our fellow Java programmers:
Love the music
Cool game. =)
great game :slight_smile:
impressed me very much
Very nice game
Really nice game I love it
I am impressed

Kind regards,
Mike

For the updates after the 11th of September, please visit the forum!

11th of September 2011
New:
Farms! You now get to place one free farm with two trucks when you start playing. Farms generate food and by bringing it to cities you will earn money and make the city grow quicker. For a full list of changes refer to this thread.
The area used when deciding how big a share of the passengers in the city should go to your station is now highlighted when building a station
There is now a clock visible with the current time and date of the in game world. At a later stage the clock will be incorporated into the new menu. For a description about game time vs real life time see this thread

Modified:
Upgrading the speed of the buses now increase the maintenance cost with half of what it previously was
Removing stations now come under build/remove station on the statistics page
Tweaked the graphics and sizes of all buildings
You can only invest into research if you have money
Slowed the speed of the vehicles a little bit
Bus stations now has a max number of people waiting of 150 (instead of based upon number of houses in the vicinity), with research you can increase the capacity to 900. Passengers added still uses houses close as a factor
When you build a bus station there are already 50 people waiting to get money a bit quicker
Goods waiting on stations is stored in the database every 30 minutes and read back if the server needs to restart
Cities grow both based upon passengers transported to and from the city instead of only from
Cities always grow even if you don’t bring anything (but really, really slowly), transport people or bring food to a city to increase the growth significantly
When the server restarts it continues at the hour where it stopped instead of restarting at the beginning of the day, making the daily statistics better
The statistics page now displays until what hour of today that it is displaying

Bugs:
Fixed a bug where old graphics cards could not always see the grass texture
Fixed a bug where vehicles were displayed as being on a station they weren’t
Fixed a bug that could cause several java processes to linger around if the connection was lost
Fixed a bug that caused the vehicle to be sent to the wrong station when there were several windows on top of each other
Fixed a bug that would display your vehicles as “loading” and never leave if you stopped them last time you were logged in


4th of September 2011
Bugs:
Fixed a bug that would make it impossible to raze stations/roads when in negative money, even though those action give money


2nd of September 2011
New:
Research! There are four kind of research at the moment, bus speed, bus capacity, station capacity and station load time. Click here for a more detailed post about it

Modified:
Buses now carry 30 passengers instead of 50
Bus maintenance is halved
Stations can now hold half as many passengers
The economy overview page now uses . delimiters in the numbers
The economy overview page now displays the statistics for two days ago
The economy overview now displays money spent on research
Improved the layout and changed some items around in the economy overview page
When setting the destination of a vehicle you can now click on another station window to tell the vehicle to go there
Removing stations now give you some 4000 instead of costing you 4000, this to allow people with negative numbers to be able to raze unprofitable stations
Vehicles always pay maintenance, even if no end station is set


31st of August 2011
New:
There is now an economy overview page that displays information about what all incomes and expenses are for yesterday and today (in game time, one day is 2 hours as will be possible to see on the game time clock once implemented)

Modified:
You can no longer by accident scroll a list when clicking making you click on something you didn’t mean to
The vehicle list and window now displays profit per day (in game, 2 hours) to be in line with the other preparations for in game time
The station list now displays the cost for each station and it’s sortable, if your maintenance on a station is huge it will help to build another station in the city to off load the first one
The station window now displays the maintenance per in game day instead of hour so it is relevant with vehicle profits

Bugs:
Fixed a page cache problem that could give you the wrong pages when browsing around


30th of August 2011
New:
All server side code for statistics is finished, now just to make a page so it’s visible for you

Modified:
Increased the vehicle maintenance cost significantly
Lowered the station maintenance cost when having a ton of passengers coming to a single station
Lowered the chance that city houses only follow straight roads instead of going their own way
When trying to build too long tunnels/bridges there is a message about it instead of nothing happening
Improved the performance of the station list window
Sorting on name in the vehicle window list now gives the correct order of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8… instead of 1-10-100-101…2-20-200-201…
Renamed some cities with not desired names

Bugs:
Fixed a bug where it wasn’t possible to remove a tunnel/bridge if there was no road next to it
Fixed a bug that caused vehicles to drive on forever if they moved square container while the square container was loading. Please let me know if there still are vehicles driving off road or off the map


29th of August 2011
New:
Vehicle profit for the previous hour no longer resets to 0 with every server restart after the current one
When cities add houses they now remove unused roads owned by players to be able to place their houses

Modified:
Removing your own roads now give you 20 instead of costing you 20. Removing bridges/tunnels give you 60 per square instead of costing you 60
The maintenance cost for stations with a lot of passengers have been lowered and a minimum fee has been added
The vehicle profit has been adjusted to even out short and long trips. Long trips give some more money but requires more buses to uphold your reputation
Maintenance cost on stations is now displayed per hour (in the game, 5 minutes in real life, will make more sense when there is a clock). Vehicle profit is still displayed as real life hour, that’ll be changed soon
Even if you’re hated you’ll still get 90% of the passengers of the city if you’re the only one in the city. If there are more players you do not get nothing but you might very well get less than 1% of the passengers

Bugs:
Fixed a bug where you could remove your own roads, even if they were used


28th of August 2011:
New:
Forum! The game now has a dedicated forum, please stop by and post your ideas.

Modified:
The rankings page now has the correct button graphic

Bugs:
Fixed a bug where the password field when logging in would display the password instead of stars (*****)


27th of August 2011:
New:
When a vehicle is stopped at a station you can now change the other destination
It’s now possible for me to broadcast messages to the logged in clients, for example to warn for a server restart

Modified:
All clickable links in the vehicle and station windows are now bold so it’s easy to see where you can click


25th of August 2011:
New:
Added hourly station maintenance cost to the station windows
By clicking on “Vehicles currently in this station” in the station window you’ll instead see all vehicles using the station

Modified:
Vehicles with negative profit shows up in red in the vehicle list
The city list doesn’t show all text in bold anymore
You only see the labels of other people’s stations if zoomed in a lot
Changed maintenance cost to be deducted every 5 minutes instead of every 10 minutes to prepare for day cycles
Planting/removing trees has a direct impact on your reputation instead of having to wait for up to 2 hours

Bugs:
Fixed a bug that could cause two vehicles to have the same name
Fixed an issue that could cause an faked client message to put the server into an infinite loop (Way to go testing guys :P)
Moved the station marker on the map half a square so the station is at the correct position
The station window updates to the correct status when you set a vehicle to stop


24th of August 2011:
New:
You can now tell vehicles to stop at the next station
When a vehicle is stopped you can sell it for 2000 (next up is changing the other station while stopped)

Modified:
You now start the game with twice as much money (400.000 instead of 200.000)
You get about 1/10th of the money for really long trips, if you have a good path it’s still better than short distances
The passengers added has been halved, but by increasing your reputation you’ll get extra passengers
Vehicle maintenance has been decreased somewhat
Station maintenance costs change with passengers using your station, the more passengers, the more expensive maintenance (as will be seen on the station window later)

Bugs:
Fixed a bug that would cause blank areas in the game when building trees close to the borders of the world


23rd of August 2011:
Bugs:
Lowered the possibility of seeing a car driving off road (they never drive off road on the server so you’ll always get your money as intended)
Fixed a bug where vehicles were added to stations when they weren’t actually there


21st of August 2011:
New:
You can now click on the stations in the vehicle window to open the corresponding station
You can now click or drag in the lists to scroll
You can now see the number of vehicles using a station in the station window
You can now see the max passengers waiting in the station window

Modified:
The cities window has been made bigger so you can see more cities in one view

Reputation:
You can now see your reputation to a city by clicking on the city label, reputation is updated once every 2 hours
Reputation is now visible in the cities list and it’s sortable
Not transporting people from your stations will lower your reputation to the city, transporting people will raise your reputation. If you built a ton of stations in a city and don’t take care of your passengers you will soon not get any passengers anymore (I’m looking at you counterp! ;))
Planting trees raises your reputation, removing trees lowers it


19th of August 2011:
New:
The vehicle list can now be sorted on name, profit and status
The station list can now be sorted on name, passengers waiting and vehicles using the station

Modified:
Removed the start and end station from the vehicle list to be able to show twice as many vehicles

Bugs:
Fixed an html login issue that could happen on internet explorer
Fixed a bug where negative vehicle profit was displayed as 0
Lowered the amount of flickering in windows when clicking on options really quickly
Fixed a dead lock that could happen when rotating a station
Fixed a dead lock that could happen when selecting vehicles/setting destinations
Fixed a client null pointer exception when teleporting to a station/vehicle
Fixed a bug that caused the city names to disappear
Fixed a bug that caused the walls of the buildings to come out of the roof
Fixed a bug (hopefully, don’t have a way to test it) where older intel gfx cards showed water through the land
Fixed a bug where the water wasn’t visible in the corner of the land


13th of August 2011:
New:
Maintenance cost, stations cost 180 per hour and vehicles 480, the money is deducted once every 10 minutes. The profit displayed on the vehicle list is after the deduction of the maintenance cost

Bugs:
Fixed a bug which could cause the server to not accept any new logins
Fixed a bug that caused no cars of other players to be visible


12th of August 2011:
Bugs:
Fixed a bug where the number of passengers waiting on a station would jump/not update correctly


11th of August 2011:
Bugs:
Fixed a bug with the server constantly utilizing 100% of a cpu by increasing the performance of path finding over long paths with 30.000 (!) times


9th of August 2011:
New:
The money each vehicle made in the last hour is now visible in the vehicle list (not yet sortable) and the vehicle window. It updates once per hour, but not on the whole hour. It’s not stored in the database yet so it’ll be reset at each server restart

Bugs:
Fixed an issue where trying to locate a vehicle where the path cannot be found crashes the game
Fixed an issue where a vehicle would say “Cannot find path” even though there is a path
Fixed an issue where you couldn’t locate vehicles that were on the way far away from the player
Fixed some general client bugs around vehicles
Fixed an issue where a bus that didn’t have a path (correctly) took really long to start driving after a path was created
Fixed an issue where the money displayed had a formatting error when money came in at the same time as it was given out


8th of August 2011:
New:
Added information to the vehicle list window, it now also displays the current status of the vehicle and the stations used
The vehicle and the station window now has a goto button to easily locate your station, as before the goto for vehicles is a bit buggy and will be fixed in not too long, there might also be some vehicles that say “cannot find path” even though they actually are driving, and if you try to locate them the game might crash :wink:
The vehicle/station window list now opens the vehicle/station window instead of going to the station right away

Tweaks:
Changed the default sort direction of inhabitants on the city window
Changed the station color on the map to red

Bugs:
Fixed an issue with the map not being displayed properly when logged in for more than 20 minutes
Potentially fixed a bug where the money displayed incorrectly for a short period of time


7th of August 2011:
Bugs:
Fixed an issue with the map not being generated on the server correctly
Fixed an issue with the map throwing an error
Fixed all known path finding problems
Fixed an issue where you couldn’t click enter to log into the game
Removing trees on the client when building roads now deducts money correctly
The game starts again in the vicinity of where you left


6th of August 2011:
Map:
The map zooms in relation to where you have your mouse cursor
You can move the map using the arrow keys
All of your stations are visible on the map

Bugs:
Fixed a bug that hindered the map from being generated on the server
Fixed a bug that caused the money on the client to be out of sync


5th of August 2011:
Map:
Download the newest version of the map every 20 minutes
Improved the quality of the map to easier see individual houses
Updated the loading screen so it displays that it’s downloading the map instead of putting it under “Connecting to server”
Fixed the graphical artifacts around the map
It now moves at the correct speed when dragging it with the mouse


4th of August 2011:
New:
Reputation. For now the only way to gain reputation with a city is to be the first to place a station there. Stay tuned for more ways to gain (or loose!) rep!
New way to receive passengers: the passengers of a city is shared over the stations. Stations belonging to players with more reputation or stations with more houses within 4 squares gain a bigger part of the passengers given out from a city
When starting a new account you now start randomized at a city (instead of just in the middle of the map)
Two different ways to load buses, “Load” and “Full load”. The first one takes what’s available after 20 seconds and leaves, the second one waits until there are 50 people and then leaves. It’s adjustable on the vehicle screen

Tweaks:
You start with 200.000 instead of 150.000
Money generated from buses is halved (people ended up with millions they couldn’t spend :P)
People come more quickly to your stations (you might need 3 buses per station to start with instead of 2)
Doubled the number of people needed to be transported for a city to grow as there are more passengers

Code improvements:
Zooming in from the map now gives a much shorter loading period (the clouds)
Map is 4 times the size

Bugs:
No more vehicles with weird numbers blocking you from buying more
Some general bug fixes on the server side


3rd of August 2011:
New:
Map (beta)! Zooming out now got a whole new meaning! Current limitations: It doesn’t move exactly right when scrolling, can only scroll with the mouse, only zooms towards the middle and not towards the mouse cursor, doesn’t rotate with the camera, only downloads when starting the applet and has some funky graphical effects in the corners

Code improvements:
Teleporting to another part of the map now gives a much shorter loading period (the clouds)
Streaming the data from the database lowered the memory footprint to a 7th, making it possible to create a bigger map after the reset

Bugs:
Fixed an infinite loop that halted the whole server
Due to bugs around changing the end station of a vehicle once initially set that option has been removed for now


2nd of August 2011:
New:
Your stations now have a yellow text color instead of white, an even smaller risk of loosing your stations!
Your buses are now red while the buses of the competing companies are greyish
A window with all cities with the ability to go to them, sortable by name or inhabitants (ascending or descending)
Added the ability to scroll in lists(using scroll wheel or page up/down, the last goes quicker if you hold down the key)
Added rankings once you selected a server, refresh if you don’t see it. The button is temporary…
Added to the station list number of passengers waiting and number of buses using the station (Thanks Apo!)

Code improvements:
Separated I/O from server logic and made the logic single threaded (Thanks for the blessing Riven :))

Bugs:
Fixed a log in issue where no one would be able to log in anymore due to a server deadlock
Fixed an issue where the old player wouldn’t be removed from the server correctly when the client left without closing the session correctly
Fixed another log in dead lock issue… I really hope it’s the last one
The list item highlighted is now the list item selected if you click, no more round error when clicking on the border


1st of August 2011:
New:
A window with your stations with the ability to go to them
A window with your vehicles with the ability to go to them (still a bug when going to a vehicle under way that is far away from the current view port)

Bugs:
Fixed a log in issue when someone logged out in a corner of the map
Fixed a server crash if you tried to log in with a session that didn’t exist
Fixed an issue with containers of land not displaying
Fixed an issue that stopped some players from being able to be logged in
Fixed an issue that kept stations at 0 passengers if you moved away from a station and then came back


31st of July 2011:
Tweaks:
Increased the money recieved from passengers with 5 times
Decreased the minimum loading time from 1 minute to 20 seconds
Increased the speed cities grow with 5 times

Bugs:
Fixed a bug where reloading the server didn’t update the database with the user’s current amount of money
Fixed a bug with connection lost not reloading the page
Fixed one of two bugs with vehicles not being added correctly
Added extra logging around the second vehicle not added bug
Fixed a bug which prohibited people from logging into the game

All I see is a completely blank white screen but I can hear the jazzy-style music playing.

Safari 5.1
Mac OSX Lion


Java Plug-in 1.6.0_26
Using JRE version 1.6.0_26-b03-383-11A511 Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM
User home directory = /Users/skiyookaSession: s9vq9v2glgj8cm4ck2p4qnk6v5
High quality: true
OpenGL renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M OpenGL Engine
OpenGL vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL version: 2.1 NVIDIA-7.2.9
VBO extension: true

I noticed that you logged in and tried to move around but didn’t do anything… I never tested it under Mac (only windows xp/vista/7 and linux). Does other lwjgl games (like minecraft) work for you?

It’s difficult without error message, I’ll try to find someone with a mac and test some things on their computer.

I can play games with lwjgl 2.7.1. Sounds like I logged in okay and perhaps my input was accepted but I only saw white in my browser.

I’ll try to compare some initiation code and see where I end up. I’m also not sure if I’m running 2.7 or 2.7.1 but that should hopefully not make or break it.

To whoever created the account ‘huhu’: Thanks for finding the bug with the trees, fixed it :slight_smile:

Mike

worked beautifully

however, I started out playing around with the landscape stuff, not paying attention to my money, and all of the sudden I only had 5,000 left, so I couldn’t build those houses
Am I stuck now ? =D

Love the music

Haha, you’re stuck! ::slight_smile: Just create another account, it’s all for testing anyway :slight_smile:

Mike

Are the other games you tested also applets? Kappa enlightened me around Mac Lion support and it seems like LWJGL doesn’t support applets using Lion with Plugin2 (yet).

Mike

I get this every frame:

java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.stateofprofit.client.r.b.p(Unknown Source)
	at com.stateofprofit.client.o.f.s(Unknown Source)
	at com.stateofprofit.client.o.f.processMessages(Unknown Source)
	at com.stateofprofit.client.o.d.run(Unknown Source)

One problem is that building roads easily costs thousands of dollars, but the bus-tickets only cost the passengers a few dollars. After a few minutes you spent all your money and the only thing you can do to advance is: sit and wait. As the world is persistant, that probably means I can login tomorrow and see what’s up, but you might want to look for ways to keep this game entertaining for a bit longer, because with the current gameplay, players probably won’t come back for more.

Still, nicely done, for your ‘first mmo’ :slight_smile:

I might have fixed your NullPointerException (there were some places in that function where I didn’t think a null could be returned, but I guess you proved me wrong :)).

Regarding the waiting time: I have been moving it back and fourth but if I make it possible to build a new station once every 10 min or so then the whole map will be full after a day (even if there is something like a thousand cities and 2.5 million squares). The current way might be too slow though, if you get some stations up and running you’ll be able to build a new station and car after 24 hours.

I doubled the rate they generate money to speed things up a bit, I’ll apply it once the current people are logged out as I’ll need to restart the java app on the server to apply the change. [EDIT: Applied]

You’re right that if you come back tomorrow you’ll have something like 50.000 to build more on and thanks to some nice waterfall effect your profit will constantly increase. I agree that people might not come back the next day for more, but that’s also because I barely have any content in the game, it was quite difficult to make my own engine and client server app and so on, now it’s time to add content :slight_smile:

Thanks for the testing and kind words.

Boooo, I loose 10k :’(. I click on the button to buy a bus and didn’t get it ???

It is a nice start. But there is a lot more work to do ;).
I wonder how you will deal with competition between company in a town.

[quote=“Bonbon-Chan,post:13,topic:37032”]
I see you buying 3 busses, did you buy more? The server keeps track of the money so if the client for some reason didn’t send the request to the server and only removed your money (the bastard!) you’ll get the money back within 30 seconds.

[quote=“Bonbon-Chan,post:13,topic:37032”]
I’m hoping it’ll be fun to play in half a year or so and that I can ask money for it somewhere inbetween then and in a year… yes there is alot left to do :slight_smile:

Regarding competition:
The citizens will like/dislike you depending on your actions (remove their trees and they like you less, plant some new ones, transport people on time and pay for some marketing and they will adore you). Depending on that and how many houses you have close to your station compared to the competition you’ll get more or less of the passengers. At the moment everyone gets the same amount (it’s only based upon houses within 5 squares of your station) so building in the same city as others isn’t discouraged… yet

Oh, and Riven, I see that the error disappeared, yay for me :slight_smile:

Mike

I understand that you don’t want your world to advance too quickly, but I think that it’d be a good idea to seriously speed it up during the alpha/beta (just increase the price of a ticket by factor 10). You want your ‘testers’ to see as much of the game as possible, even if that means you have to reset the world every week.

True, I 10 folded it again it’s now 20 times more than the first time you logged in and 10 times more than the second time (oh yes, I keep track of you! ;))

Sorry for kicking you out Apo, I cannot change the profit without kicking everyone out for 1 minute…On the other hand I missed to store the money in the database so you and bonbon made a lot of money from the restart :wink: (fixed now)

Mike

Cool game. =)

Very nice start. But I miss some stats (in the world: which bus station is mine, which bus is mine (little label and or other colors), stats how much money I got), a minimap(!!!), a nicer GUI and upgrades and and and. =)


network: Connecting http://stateofprofit.com:39430/ with proxy=DIRECT
Exception in thread "Thread-18" java.lang.NullPointerException
	at java.awt.Container.remove(Unknown Source)
	at com.stateofprofit.client.Main.E(Unknown Source)
	at com.stateofprofit.client.o.a.run(Unknown Source)

Haha, I actually had all of those things on my to do list (it is a loooooooong list :)) the next thing will be a map (so if you zoom out more than currently possible you’ll be able to zoom out far enough to see the whole world). Thanks alot for testing and for the comments.

You’re the best bug finder evah, aren’t you? I’ll have a look at it, thanks :slight_smile: [EDIT] found it and fixed it, didn’t update the online version though as I am on my way out the door :slight_smile:

Kind regards,
Mike

[quote=“Mickelukas,post:14,topic:37032”]

At the time you look, i have only 2 buses. I don’t know if I get my money back (since I got lot’s more money) or if I get my bus (I didn’t manage to find my buildings !!!)

As a request, the first thing to do :wink: :

  • a window with the list of building of our company
  • a window with the list of buses of our company
  • when a building/buses “name” is clicked, the view is centered on it

The mini map is only second on it for me.