Stareater is a turn based 4X strategy game set in space. Play as a leader of a nation, research futuristic technologies, colonize other star systems, fight or negotiate with other leaders and solve the mysteries of a star eating creature. Previously known under Croatian name Zvjezdojedac, the project is primarily inspired by Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares but there are influences of the other games of the genre such as Master of Orion I & III, Ogame, Sword of the Stars and Space Empires 5. This project is a prototype meaning it's main objective is to implement and test the idea. GUI, graphics and sounds are secondary.

Version 0.3 and later have multilingual support and have Croatian and English translation. Prior versions were Croatian only. Although this is a C# project, builds can be run with Mono in both Linux and Mac OS.

Instructions for Windows and debug configuration:

1. Install NuGet (command line tool for managing external dependencies)

• You may need to configure your IDE to use it
• There is an extension for Visual Studio
• SharpDevelop already comes with integrated NuGet

2. Build {Stareater}/tools/Tools.sln

• {Stareater} is repository root directory
• Build with "Debug" configuration
• It will create texture generator tool needed for the next step

4. Run {Stareater}/scripts/gen_textures.bat

• OS-es other then Windows may not know how to execute the script, in that case one has to manually run texture generator with appropriate parameters

5. Make game data available to game's executable

• Game data files are in {Stareater}/build/ directory
• Game's executable file is in {Stareater}/Stareater.UI.WinForms/bin/Debug/ directory
• Run {Stareater}/scripts/link_build_to_bin.bat to create symbolic links
• Run {Stareater}/scripts/copy_build_to_bin.bat to copy files if you don't want symbolic links
• Again, scrips may not work on OS-es other then Windows

6. Build {Stareater}/source/Zvjezdojedac.sln
7. If all steps above were successful, the game can be run