NStars!

NStars is a project to clone the popular Stars! game in C#/.NET, as well as to provide tools that aid in the playing of Stars!. Currently, it is is very preliminary and it most likely will not be complete for a long while.

NStars eventually hopes to:

• Provide a suitable substitute for the existing Stars! application
• Provide a platform for the billion Stars! utilities out there
• Avoid the trap that many modern Windows apps have and not have a big clunky install process.  I like the old days when you uncompress an archive and run the binary :-)
• Avoid the traps that many open source apps have and not end up with an awkward application that requires UNIX sysadmin expertise to simply run :-)
• Have fun with all of that cool stuff in GDI+
• Keep the spirit alive

Being written in C#/.NET, NStars requires the .NET framework to be installed, which of course is currently only on Windows.  Hopefully in the future, Mono will take care of that.

NStars is currently in version 0.4.  Pretty much, one can start a single player game and build factories, mines and defenses.  Even this is not fully implemented.  My next milestone is to have an almost "playable" multiplayer, where one can just build factories, mines, and defenses.

SourceForge project page

Screenshots

A new game

Race creation wizard

Viewing a *.map/*.pla file combination of an existing game