Great game! Thanks for calling our attention to it.

Wow, I love it.

You'll be seeing a lot of games like this over the next few days, because they're the entrants for TIGSources procedural game development contest.

That's good news, Dominic, thx! I love the procedural patterns, but I also adore the translucent graphics. It would be great if other entries had comparable qualities.

Can't be played on windows XP 64bit edition. A shame too, it sounds good.

I wiped the galaxy clean! :O

Are the number of AI players random? I played it 4 times and two times there were 3 (fairly 'small' battles), and only one time I saw 4 (where there were 'big' battles).

Anonymous: There are between 3 and 6 enemy AIs and the number is chosen randomly when you start your game.

BTW I've updated the game to hopefully fix the crashes and eternal digging, slightly improve the AI and tweak the settings. new download link is at http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/Dyson-v1.01.rar. If you have a previous version you can get the patch at http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/Dyson-v1.01-patch.rar.

Wow, this game is really incredible. There's so much to love about this game: the epic 3-way space battles, the the feeling of being a medieval conqueror as you crush planet after planet, it's all phenomenal.

I don't think I've ever played a game as immersive as this.

First strategy game I've ever really liked. Not sure about the replay value, but I definitely had a lot of fun the first time through.

Great game. Will definitely stay on my harddrive :)

I believe for most people the replay value is low, because once you've figured out a winning strategy you can stick to it until the very end. (The energy/attack/speed statistics of the individual asteroids don't seem to have much of an impact so far, I just crush the enemy with sheer numbers.)

That said, I replayed it four times last night. :-P

Brilliant game. Really enjoyed my first playthrough, and will probably have at least a couple more. 5/5!

I tried it again haowan, and it still crashes.

bit of a shame the trees are all the same.

while it looks nice, it isn't much fun to me. i don't remember the exact name, but i've played a game with the same concept (ie. multiple planets all producing units constantly), which was a better game (they probably had a lot more time to work on it though).

Hi guys, I've just released another patch (http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/Dyson-patch.rar) which should fix more of the crash issues.

colonp: you may be thinking of GalCon, it's a great game and I thought about it more than once as Dyson became what it is now. We were not intending for Dyson to become quite like this - the original design is quite different, so expect Dyson to change over time.

I'm also rewriting the tree code to give a bit of diversity.

Found a bug. I was attacking an enemy asteroid and it indicated there was 1 tree left (though there wasn't). So the seedlings were ramming the ground trying to attack the core but never entered the asteroid. I went on to wipe out the rest of the asteroid belt, but this one asteroid never fell, even to over 400 seedlings.

Also, when moving lots of seedlings I have noticed a point when they stop obeying your commands and you have to wait for some seedlings to complete their move.

Otherwise a very interesting game. It has a lot of potential and I hope you continue to work on it and develop new gameplay elements.

I encounter the same bug about not being able to enter an asteroid. Except there were two of them on one map. One had a tree and the other didn't.

I kind of hated that when you view far away, blue and gray dots somewhat look the same. It was a bit hard to distinguish between my guys.

Fun game nonetheless.

I don't know if the patch(es) cleared the problem of seedlings not being able to get into a treeless asteroid, so this may be just for the record: In the last case I encountered this problem, it was due to a large seedling stuck in the entrance of a root channel.

I'm looking forward to the new trees! :-) (Although they look great already).

great game!

by the way, it works fine on xp-64 for me, so whatever problem ruke's having isn't global to every xp-64 install.

As soon as I realised what was going on, I was instantly taken in by this game. To put it simply it's genius. The concept is executed perfectly.

http://www.imitationpickles.org/galcon/index.html

Well, I must say that its a great game, thanks. I especialy love the movement of the groups of seeds.
Do you plan to create some mods for it? For example differend trees to upgrade stats of planets or some race variations or differend seeds? It will bring some kind of replayability to the game...

installed net2.0 on a 1.2ghx celeron with 384 ddr memory, is this too slow of a machine? because dyson is running real slow, double clicking takes long too..please any tips?

Very very nice game. Reminds me a bit to the Introversion Soft Games.
I like the style, the gameplay, everything. Great job!

Thanks Philip!

anon: That sounds like a system that is definitely sailing close to the minimum specs for Dyson to run. Despite appearances it is quite a processor-heavy game, partly due to having been developed on a relatively high-end system to the one you are using. I am sorry if it's not running at a good speed for you; I will try to update it with optimisations in the future.

does anybody have a winning strategy? i keep getting killed...

haowan: are these flocks following a boid-movement scheme? if yes, how did you manage the nearest-neighbor-n²-problem?

5onthe5: try to settle as soon as possible to neighboring planets (those with low core energy). that strategy is cheaper than growing trees..
and try to scout the hostile planets with > 2 trees and attack them when abandoned.

Philip:
The seedlings don't flock at all actually. They're completely independent and have a roaming AI that is active in different proportions depending on their AI state. They have other things that affect their direction of flight, but these are mostly just the asteroids (for flying around them). The only things they actually collide with are the asteroids.

Regardless of these limitations, they still manage to appear to look quite flocky, especially when they are all attacking the same enemy. When they are sent to another asteroid, they leave one by one (the path finder only processes one route per frame), which adds to the appearance of flocking unintentionally.

For checking collisions and whether things should be drawn, the game uses a simple bucket-sort where the world is divided into equal boxes and items checking collisions only check their own box plus neighbouring boxes.

I think this game is totally brilliant, but it could be better. One thing i have thought of is a multiplayer mode and you could allso put some upgrades like better atk power or better armor and speed. Then this game would be very very nice.

I hope you make a new version soon :)

thanks for a good game!!