before you start the client Welcome to the first part of video tutorial for the main client for playing Thousand Parsec games. In this tutorial we will show you how to find a server, create an account and then connect to a game.
start the client and wait till the connection dialog?
When you start the client and the cool intro video finishes, a Connect to Server dialog appears. You use it to connect to a Thousand Parsec game server.
highlight the various feilds as they are mentioned As you can see it asks you to enter the name of the server to connect to, the username of the account you have on this server and its password.
The first time you start, the default values will log you in as guest on the primary demo server. This lets you view the universe but not actually play the game.
To actually start playing, we need to create a new account. To do this we click the "Find" button, which is next to the Server field.
click the "find" button
This brings up the "Server Browser" dialog which shows you all the servers known to the client. The game client gets the list of servers from a special Thousand Parsec metaserver, which is also available through your web browser.
show the metaserver website
As you can see, the same servers are listed on this page. The links on this page let you start the client directly from the web browser. OK, let's return to the client.
return to the client
highlight the various columns and let the tooltip show In addition to server names it also shows which game is being played on each server, how many players are playing this game, how many objects are in the Universe and some other info.
Let's pick some server... The Demo1 one looks quite nice. Now we also need to create an account for ourselves on this server, by clicking on the New Account button.
click the new account button
A new dialog opens where the server is already entered into the server field. As you can see, it is very similar to the first Connect to Server dialog.
First we need to check that the server supports remote creation of accounts. Some servers may require that you sign up through a webpage or may be private games. You can do this by clicking the "check" button.
click the check button
Now you can enter your desired username and password. You have to enter the same password two times. Just to make sure you didn't make typo. Finally, you also enter your e-mail address and click the OK button.
click the okay button
The server will tell you if it has successfully created your new account. Let's click OK again, and one more time on the very first dialog. At this point the client asks you, if you would like to save the account details, so that you can use the entered account information anytime in the future when you connect to the same server. Let's say Yes.
The client will now download the information about the game Universe and then you will actually be ready to conquer the Universe.
The next tutorial will show you the basics of navigating the Universe and issuing orders.
- Maybe add recalling other accounts?
- What about the 'g' button, that probably needs to be explained?
Welcome to the second video tutorial for the main client for playing Thousand Parsec games. This tutorial will show you around the main window of the client.
Once you have an account on a server and you succesfully connect to that server, the client <dramatic>downloads the Universe</dramatic>voice>. This means it gets the information about players in the game, planets, spaceships, and whatnot. After the downloading is complete just click OK to get into the game.
As in many other programs the first thing that pops up is the Tip of the Day window. When you read all the tips you can disable the window by de-selecting the Show tips at startup option. Now let's click on the Close button to hide tips and get to the main window.
At the heart of the game is the StarMap. Curently all the systems are cramped in the center of the map. So I will use the Zoom dropdown menu and select the Fit option. This makes all the systems in the universe fit nicely into the StarMap wiew. Other options are to zoom the map to view just some percentage, like this... Or you can also select to draw a Box around objects you would like to see in the map view.
Now look at the map and find a green colored system (that's a dot with an orbit and one or more smaller dots around it). This is our home system. Other systems are colored in red (these are enemy systems) or in white (these are unclaimed systems). If you click on the last dropdown menu above the StarMap, where it now says Verses, and then select Individual, each system will be colored, depending on who owns it. Each player has his (or her) own, random, color.
There is another different type of view on the Universe. If you click on the dropdown list, where it now says Systems, you can select the Resources option. You now get a pie-chart at every point in the Universe where there are some resources. For example here the red part represents the Home Planet resource and the blue part represents the Ship Part resource. Off course you can show all these resources separately, as defferently sized circles, if you select a specific resource from the second dropdown list where currently All is selected.
Notice that when you have different view modes selected the data in the information popups is also different. Oh yeah, you might be wondering what this little triangles on the map are. These are spaceships. Or more accurately, fleets of spaceships. There is also one big red triangle on the map. This one shows the currently selected object.
One more thing to explain about the starmap, this button right here. By defualt it shows an ordinary mouse pointer. This means clicking on the map selects objects. If you click on the button a menu shows where you can select Move. In this mode you can click anywhere on the map and move the map around. You can probably guess what Zoom In and Zoom Out options do. There is also a disabled option Waypoint, well see what this does in another tutorial. Keep in mind that you can always return to the default selection mode by just pressing the Escape key on your keyboard. And when you are in the Mouse selection mode you can still move the map around if you click in an empty space and move the map.
It's time we look at all the panels around the StarMap.
At the right you can see the System tree view. It shows all the objects in the Universe in a similar way you can explore files and folders on your hard disk. At the bottom you can see a quick search bar, which you can use to quickly find some object that is lost somwhere in space.
In the bottom-right corner there is the Messages panel. Here you will first see a welcome message from the server. Later in the game you will receive messages about various events, like battles, completed constructions, and the like. You can use Prev and Next buttons to move from one message to another. Clicking Delete will remove the currently shown message. The Goto button gets enabled when you get a message that references some objects from the game. Clicking on this button enables you to quickly jump to those objects.
To the left of the Messages panel is the Information wiew. It shows all the data about the currently selected object. Further to the left you can also see a picture of the currently selected object.
Above the picture there's the Orders list, showing all orders asigned to the current object. This is also where you can manage orders, like add them, remove or edit them. We will see how to use this panel in detail in one of the next tutorials.
One last important thing is hiding at the right of the status bar. The EOT acronym means End Of Time and here is where the countdown until the end of turn is shown, in hours, minutes and seconds.