Sorry for the lack of updates. Lots of things have been happening, had two very productive weeks, my focus jumps around, but that’s the state of things right now, many things need improving, adding to etc. Here’s a summary:

Changed how the hud in ship mode to shows the targeted ship’s status, speed, and distance – instead of the “text boxes” on the lower left – it now shows this information in the target’s target box. It also shows 3 “colored diamons” – that light up when certain conditions are met. For example if enemy is in weapons range – the green diamond lights up. The hud also now has a 2d arrow – the 3d arrow is still around but will most likely go away. This arrow points towards the enemy when it is off the screen.

Added a better way of ship changing – basicaly showing you a list of your ships, you can then chose the one you want to switch to instead of the blind < > keys. The “ship switch” screen also has a camera that shows you what’s happening with that selected ship, so you can also use it to see what your ships are up to. You can pause the action or let it continue.

Debris added – when ships die – they can leave behind debris – which will linger for some time and then die themselves.

Certain ships can have guns that recoil, weapons can also push back the firing ship when they fire, and all weapons can now push the target that they hit.

Was actually hoping to add a few screen shots to this, been wanting to do this for a while since its so bare, ran out of time tonight though.

Glad to have put out iteration 12, it feels a bit incomplete and it feels as if it took longer than it should have. There’s a few things to “blame” here, though not all of them bad. First it is summer, and it has been a time of really nice weather (sunny and hot though very dry – so I suppose its reletive if you ask a farmer). Meaning that me and my wife have been going out a lot during the weekends, beaches and other outdoor activities, as well as usually a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. Nights and weekends are my primary time to work on the game, so this cut into development.

The other factor is actually art related, Drew’s friend has been helping quite a lot and so there’s been a good amount of focus on art, I often found myself tweaking textures of ships and other objects, the usual “rule of thumb” that the last 20% of something takes 80% time might not exactly apply here, but it does feel that way sometimes when I’m fiddling with a mesh to get a slight improvement that maybe is only visible to my eye.

So what does this mean to iteration 13 and the future? Well the good news for the project is that once summer is over development will speed up – due to having more time, and even in about a week my wife is heading to her childhood home for about two weeks so during that time I think I’ll revert to my “bachelor” life style of being glued to the computer.

Plans for iter 13 can be summarized by this statement – lots of little stuff and a few big things.

One of the big is coding the game engine to support “gate travel” – so the player will go through the gate and end p ina new sector. This involves putting in “invisible” collision objects – so simply put just physics “bodies” – nothing that ends up on the screen, theese will sit and wait for collisions at which point they’ll trigger things – like gate travel. Other things will be to trigger mission objectives – eg: go here.

Small things:
improved ship switching – show a “gui” that lets you select the ship to switch to, sort by distance, show info such as health, distance, target, class etc.
more hud visuals and tactical – objective visuals, show target health/speed/range in hud marker (in 3d not on the “gui”)
new weapon types and properties
ships leaving debris when they blow up

There’s more here if you are interested.

So I think lots of exciting things to come.

Iteration 12 is released. Hope you enjoy

Doing final testing and bug fixes. Fixed a bunch of save/load bugs and other issues. Had a very strrange bug pop up last week and take up a lot of time to figure out (still not sure the exact cause/solution – but crash no longer triggers).

Focusing on polish ahead of iter 12. So bug fixes, gui fixes, touch ups etc. Had a playthrough and that yielded about a half a dozen notes on tweaks.

The recently added “mouse over” info in tactical mode is really a great addition. Originally the mouse over info (eg: put the mouse over an asteroid base to see its name and crew count) was to help the player in selecting objects, but now has evolved into its own very neat feature. For example putting the mouse over an asteroid base lets the player see not only its name and crew count, but also its resources (and +- changes in them), shipyard queue, research queue. Thus this means that instead of the player having to look at 3 different screens the player simply has to mouse over the base to find out the summary information. This means that the player gets to hang out in a more active state (zooming around and mouse overing on objects) rather than a more passive (sitting in the shipyard or research screens). A really cool feature I believe, and I have to admit (somewhat sheepishly) that I didn’t expect this big of an impact, though it now seems obvious.

The dynamic of the player having two roles – the warrior and the leader is taking shape niceley. Meaning that the player can engage in ship to ship combat in ship mode and while waiting for these engagements will be managing the empire. This is a good sign that I’m very happy to see.

Added “hit pings” (when a weapon hits an object) to tactical and re-did the tactical explosion “pings” (when an object gets destroyed). Quite the improvement, but now I’m on the fence about the “projectile” tracers that appear in tactical when a weapon gets fired. The goal is to show the player that an object is firing on another object – but not portray the exact direction and position of the weapon, so this gets a bit lost I think, I’ll probably leave it in for iter 12, but may remove it in later iterations.

Regarding the “hit pings” they are a neat effect, but because I want to differenciate tactical from ship modes – I don’t want every hit to appear in tactical – while I do want every hit to appear in ship mode. Tactical is the “information/strategy” mode so the point is to show the player that an object is getting hit, but again not portray the exact quantity and points of hit, so what happens is that the pings are limited to one every n number of seconds (currently I believe it is every 0.8 seconds). This is moddable as are the explosion and hit pings.

Some balancing issues: I split the Correa Frigate into two variants – the G and the T – the G variant has the 4 turrets, while the T has 2 turrets and the torpedo tubes. Before the ship had 4 turrets and the 6 tubes, kind of an overkill and the role was a bit muddled. The two “new” ships got a new point defense turret to add some more fun/use to them. Overall this is a neat change – the goal is that the G is the more direct ship, but the T is the more firepower though at a overall longer time and risk – because torpedos take time to reach their target and can be shot down. This will be a bit of a challenge to balance out.

Speaking of balance – right now it is pretty bad – this is because (all of the) frigate ships do too much damage too fast. I am going to tweak the projectiles that the frigate turrets to have a slower velocity – but overall the same range. Hopefully this will allow for many improvements – including making fighters more useful since they are nearly always hit by offensive frigate turrets – which are intended to be used versus large craft and not fighters. Because the projectiles travel so fast they are able to hit fighters with ease. Gotta fix that. Lots of issues remain, but that is the name of the game.

Mostly doing some polish, lots of little things – bug fixes, AI tweaks, visuals, gui, etc. Have mostly ran out of things I want to do for iter 12 so going to hold off on some larger things for the next iteration.

Speaking of the next iteration – the rought plan is to polish up ship switching (instead of blindly toggling ships you’ll get a little menu sorted by class of ship and distance to current position). Then work on AI and then allow for traveling to different “sectors” via the rock gates.

The AI work is probably the most interesting basically I want to work on “ship postures” – right now they are defensive and aggressive, and this setting determins at what range the ship will engage enemies, but I am planning on changing this to engage and pursue. Engage means engage nearby (without using gravity drive), pursue means ok to pursue far away (ok to use gravity drive). Ships will by default be engage, this will hopefuly eliminate some issues where player ships may fly off to far away places and promply get slaughtered by the defenders. Basically the goal is to make the AI more predictable.

Been working on visual feedback in tactical mode – so now you’ll see “pings” that represent objects being destroyed while in tactical mode. You’ll also see little streaks representing weapons fire. Both are placeholder particles and are in a bad need of re-work, but for now I’ll ignore them.

Also I’ve added “nav points” – basically you can create a sort of a virtual navigation beacon – and you can move this nav point and issue a go to commands to ship by selecting ships and then right clicking on the nav point. Via this you can organize your ships a bit better. If you move the nav point ships that were going to it will be updated as well – giving you a sort of a real time command over ships, I think its pretty neat

Because you can also select and focus the camera on these nav points – you can quickly zoom around the map to points of interest. For example maybe nav point 1 is your home base, and nav point 2 is an enemy base you want to keep an eye out. Press Alt 2 to select the 2nd nav point then press Alt 2 and your camera will move to look at it automatically.

I’m mostly running out of ideas for neat control features in Tactical mode, I think they are fairly solid now, so after this weekend I’ll probably focus on more visual feedback, then tweak some AI stuff, polish some and we’ll have iteration 12 to play with.

Got most of the “issue commands to individual turrets” done in Tactical mode. I always wanted the player to have control over individual turrets – to allow a scenario where the player might tell 2 turrets to attack an enemy to the right and 2 to attack an enemy to the left – or whatever combination of turrets and enemies based on the actual battle scenario. I think this gives an added layer of control and strenghtens the RTS game play. So now when the player selects a ship or a station that has turrets – the turrets will appear in tactical mode, when the player clicks on a turret or turrets (player can chose multiples via holding down the shift key) and then issue orders like normal (right click on an enemy target) to the turrets. The other options that now become avaiable to the player after selecting a turret or turrets is making that turret a primary weapon meaning that if the fire trigger/button/etc is pressed the turret will fire when under the player’s command. The final option with turrets is to set their “roles” – if you recall turrets can be set to be missile defense, offense and a few other roles.

Basically just like you can order ships and tweak their AI and orders in tactical mode, you can order turrets. Hopefuly I’ll be able to balance out the gameplay that this is actually useful to the player, I have to make sure that fights last long enough and are strategic enough to warrant this.

Now I’m turning my attention towards putting in more visual feedback in tactical mode, so if a ship gets hit or a ship explodes, I want the player to see some little damage pings or what not in tactical mode, making it a lot less dry and a lot more informative than before – where a destroyed object would simply dissapear in tactical mode.

Another cool thing is that these changes will faciliate easily putting in other “tactical objects” – for example navigation markers and objective markers/highlights. The ETA for iteration 12 is the end of the upcoming month – so the end of June. Looking forward to it!

Got diablo 3

For those wanting to play with their favorite indie game dev my battle tag is: Chaosavy#1836