GAME DESIGN
Christian Mosbo

LEAD PROGRAMER
Christian Mosbo

LEAD ARTIST
Christian Mosbo

MUSIC COMPOSITION
Chris Hopkinson

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Random Thoughts Entertainment

SPECIAL THANKS
The fine makers of POV-RAY 3.1, the program I used to make all the graphics
My family, for giving me the opportunity to be creative while I lived in England
Ed Grass, for getting me back into game programming
And all of you out there who play my games.

Silent Frontier was based on the world of The Cy, designed by Christian Mosbo

Copyright (c) 2000-2007, Christian Mosbo

Well, another 11 weeks of my life fritted away, and another game done. I started working on this one in England at my parents place, and then half way through returned to school. Ironically, my computer at school was only a Pentium 100 (worse than the one in England), and could not actually run the game. This made for long bouts of programming between testing my code at Ed's house - so it was definetly an interesting experience to debug. Also, the java 1.1 compiler I was using had about a million internal compiler errors (not my fault) as the code grew. Fortunately Ed had recently bought a Java 2 compiler, and that would compile it fine. There is a lot that I wanted to do with this game, but to make an acceptable download length I was really forced to curtail a lot of my ideas. I don't know if I can really do more than this game in the RTS genre online in java, unless I could be assured everyone had a ridiculously fast connection, so I'm either going to look into an offline sequel or never do another RTS.

...and seven years later...
Wow. well, a lot of complications with finishing parts of this game. Java has gone through a lot of changes since I started this project. One huge problem I had was I changed development environments, and the new one I use (Netbeans) stubbornly refused to load any class file that was larger than 1M - very frustrating when the class file for SF was twice that size. I ended up having to load the game files into a basic text editor, try and break up the code into multiple class files, and then reload everything into Netbeans and get it all to work.
Also, a word on level design. I made the mistake of not building my own level editor, instead I built all of the levels by hand. That is the reason it took so long for the final 20 missions to eventually be finished. However, they are now finally done. This project taught me a lot. Also, java has come a long way over the last 7 years... and I am no longer trying to get all of my games to run well on Pentium 133Mhzs. I think I can do a LOT more with a java online RTS using any Java 1.4++ version. The real problem is finding the time and compiling all of the artwork I would need for such a project.
Anyway, this beast is really finally done. It only took me 7 years to get around to finishing it. Oh well. Time for the sequel!
~ Random