Weltensaga — Overview
Weltensaga is a browser game set in a sci-fi universe. The players take control of their civilization. They can build, research, fight, explore, trade, and more.
This site is supposed to give a little background information on what makes Weltensaga work. This page supposedly contains some interesting information.
The game can be found at weltensaga.de. Besides the complete game, you will also find some screenshots and further information there.
A Short Overview: History And Numbers
- Weltensaga has been online without any major interruptions since October 2005.
- Since April 2006 it has constantly had hundreds of players.
- Many players say that it's the best browser game they've ever played, unsurpassed in complexity, depth and possibilities.
- The original design, concept and game was created by three friends, but since early 2006 only Johannes Kuhlmann has continued working actively on the game.
- The normal game universe comprises 2,500 planetary systems and about 15,000 planets (including suns, nebulae and asteroids).
- The game's techtree currently contains 194 different buildings, 315 researches and 83 spaceships.
- Of course, it's completely free to play and, for the time being, it's only available in German.
The Technical Side Of Things
The client side is rather old school:- Weltensaga is completely browser based, meaning that it doesn't even need Flash or Java. Any sufficiently modern webbrowser should work.
- It only uses good old HTML, CSS and Javascript. A few areas (about two) make extensive use of AJAX.
- Weltensaga actually is its own HTTP server, completely written in Java.
For those who know a little about such stuff, it implements the most important parts of the HTTP protocol and supports persistent connections, GZIP encoding, file uploading and many more useful things. - Furthermore, there is a template system built into the server that helps providing the representation (well, mostly HTML) and session management is an integral part, too.
- Extending the game's functionality is rather easy because of a sophisticated module and event system.
- MySQL is used as the backend through JDBC.
My Involvement
I have been working on Weltensaga since its beginning, i. e. when it was not even called Weltensaga yet. The initial game design was created together with two friends who quickly left the team when the game had been only a few months online. Since then I've been working on the game alone, only sometimes helped by some players from the game's community.
All programming was solely done by me.