I try to avoid putting the more “emotional” aspects into this blog, but here goes, my “hope reserves” took a huge hit with losing Drew, and this is a big factor. I try not to dwell on things and for the most part I’ve always been successful at this in my reletively young life. This however is a bit different of a story because this project is a big part of my inner life – I constantly think about it – so Drew’s passing is a constant presence due to the huge link that still exists. Not only losing a friend, but also losing a sounding board, a constant source of feedback, praise, criticism, and many aspects that were a constant back and forth which gave me much energy and sharpened planning and goals. It was basically a guarantee that this project would get good art, that I would get more than I asked for in terms of the visual and the game world, that my good ideas would be enhanced and bad ones questioned, that new ideas would come in – and be supported by a great degree of dedication. I was living in a dream come true and for the most part I was aware of this, I did appreciate it and still do.

Now I find it hard to make decisions on the future of the project because I’m not sure if artistically I can do (eg: get the art to support) the things I want, so it is sort of this negative presence that I have to shake to continue in a more determined and forceful way.

The project is continuing and will do so, but it would be stronger if I had a better sense of direction. I hope that I’ll read this entry in the near and distant future(s) and see it as another challenge that I overcame – the challenge is always internal – I believe that I (and humans in general) have a lot of the tools we need – we just have to use them.

Added visualizations for these commands – so for example if you want to know what ship A is doing… click on that ship and you’ll see if its patroling, turning, moving some place. This also includes the ability to see multiple way points – if they were specified via the newly re-vamped move command. Speaking of which you can now also initiate a move command via right clicking on an empty spot on the map – much like every other RTS does Something that was very much missing from the project.

I’ve also added “keyboard grouping” for ships – yep again – much like every other RTS does – press CTRL + 1,2…0 to designate selected ships to a group, then press that key to select those ships. So you can designate a defensive fleet, offensive fleets, support fleets, and quickly select them and issue orders. So far so good on these commands, but lots of polish is needed. More command and tactical visualizations on the horizon: gravity drive hops, hold command visual, mouse over info (now that right clicking an empty spot has a different function – need to show player what they are right clicking on), and hopefuly I’ll get to “combat” visualizations in tactical mode as well – ships firing on one another, taking damage, and exploding.

Working on tactical commands, here’s a quick recap:

Added a “Wait” command – sometimes you may want heavy assault shisp to go in first and more vulnerable marine frigates to wait a minute before entering the battle field.
Added a “rotate” command and put in a visual representation of where the ship(s) will rotate to.

What’s interesting about the wait and rotate commands is that these are “top level” commands – so wait will always jump to the top except when the command is rotate, so for example you could tell your ships to wait a minute before heading into battle, but in the meantime you could tell them to rotate so that their turrets get good firing angles prior to heading in.

Re-did a bunch of the tactical gui – added the above commands and the other ones (patrol, hold etc) to “buttons” which will eventually be turned from text into little icons to save space and to lessen the learning curve.

Next up is re-doing the move command and then issuing individual orders to turrets – so you could issue a wait command to your frigates – send in the fighters to distract your enemy – tell the frigates to turn a certain way, issue commands to the frigates turrets – then order a move command to strafe the battle field with turret fire Hopefuly these commands will satisfy any budding space tacticians
Feel really excited about adding in these commands.

Well its been about 2 weeks of little to no activity. Few factors at work here: its always a bit difficult to get back into the project after releasing an iteration (the question becomes what to do next), the end of a school semester, had a final exam yesterday (one (Summer) more to go till degre…) and of course Drew’s passing.

Yesterday had a fairly rough time, everything I started seemed to go badly, either I wasn’t very interested in that aspect or it was evading me due to lack of concentration, today was much better, I have a fairly good focus for iteration 12. Tactical mode enhancements. Focusing mostly on giving the player more control over ships. First few steps: a hold this position and patrol this position commands. Next up issuing go to this position via mouse right clicks and other misc commands to let the player communicate with his/her forces. Hoping to also put in the ability to issue individual turret orders – eg: in Tactical mode click on a turret – then right click on enemy.

So feeling good about the weekened right now – coding useful and interesting features, and back on track. I’m thinking that Iteration 12 is about a month and a half away going to try to focus on its scope to release it in a fairly timely fashion.

Andrew Roals – aka Slaor, the person I would refer to as “my artist” but always felt that it wasn’t an adequate description has left our world. He died of a sudden heart attack on Friday, April 20th, 2012. I was informed by his sister, prior to this I had an odd feeling because I didn’t get an email from Drew for several days, which is very out of the ordinary. Some days we’d email each other more than a dozen times.

Drew was more than I could ever ask for and now he’s gone. I feel incredibly lucky that we found each other. I feel selfish for even thinking of the project – I know it will continue, but I also know that it will be less because of this loss.

Link to Slaor’s blog including his sister’s message: ‘ardWare

His sister asked if I’d like to include a message that will be sent with Drew. This is what I wrote:

Andrew, we never met in this world, but I hope that we will meet in the next. We were a sort of a Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. You inspired me and helped fuel my motivation. I got to thank you many times, but I hoped to thank you more when this project was completed. It will not be the same without you, I will not be the same without you.

Paul

Had a playthrough of iteration 11, conquered the nearby base, overall I’m very happy because I had zero crashes in the play through, also another strong aspect is the ship to ship combat. But there are weaknesses and glitches, that need to be addressed.

One of the major ones is that control over your units is fairly hard, the units are a bit too independent, I need to work on giving the player the ability to issue “hold this position” and “patrol this position” orders. Most likely this will be done via something like a “navigational point” in tactical mode, where the player will click a spot to designate a go to point and then select friendly ships and right click on that spot to bind ships to that point. Right now there is no way to do this, although behind the scenes the code exists for wait here, or patrol here AI.

The other weakness is waiting on resources, this is far too inactive, although it is great that bases automatically produce reasources meaning that the player can focus on combat or issuing orders, there has to be a way for the player to actively gather resources to speed up ship/station building. If you’ve noticed asteroids can be shot at which yields what we internally call baby roids, these will in the future be ablet o be “harvested” and then dropped off at a transfer station to gain more resources. This too will be automated with ship’s crew doing most of the work, however this will attract attacks so the player should defend these miners to keep their output strong.

Its funny because the week after a release, I do very little coding, instead I jump on the forums and talk about the game, but its also a neat break from the frantic and obsessive drive towards a release, it also gives me time to prioritize and decide what I want to work on next.

Screenshots added and a new video. Check the new release and media out on the main page:

Void Destroyer – main page

In final stages of releasing iter 11, most likely sometime Sunday (so over 24 hours). Few minor tweaks left as well as – creating the installer, updating the website – creating screen shots and videos.

Had a play through tonight, its been a while since I played this long and with the focus on taking over the enemy base. Thoughts: it shouldn’t be very surprising that I like the game I’m making, but still it is a welcome feeling for me. The art has improved dramatically, very pleasing and rewarding to the eye (and I hope a “hook” to the player – just one more ship to destroy… feeling). Overall very stable, though I encountered (and fixed) a crash bug – having to do with the “Command” ability on the Command ship which lets you take over enemy ships.

At first the game is seemingly very easy because resources are plentiful, but once you build stations and start to want to build the marine frigate ships to take over the enemy base resources start to become more scarce and enemy attacks intensify. One of the the goal is for the game to be a challenge, but also hard to lose, and this is somewhat the case.

Right now however the game is too much waiting for resources and not enough of substancial combat. One of the reasons being is that enemies are mostly equipped with corvette class ships, while the player can build powerful frigate class ships as well as having the Command ship. Its not very fair to the enemy. I’ve removed the heavier hitting enemy ships because their art was placeholders, so while the enemy suffers the look and feel of the game improves. A good trade off I’d say.

The other reason is that the game is very simplistic, the enemy base AI is very unsophisticated, and really just throws wave after wave of ships. This will be remedied, the goal is to have complex encounters, missions and objectives. Bases will need to be weakened, defenses will need to be strenghtened, territory will change hands, battles fought and wars waged. And because (I feel) that the game is already fun… I’m very optimistic about the future.

Clawing our way toward iter 11… ok its not so bad, lots of new art has arrived, and much play testing and tweaking is happening.

Two important things happened recently – unified/made make sense the field of view setting, this is important because on wide screens with high resolutions models (the game world really) sometimes became distorted due to the fov settings, still may not have conquered this, but on a better path.

The other interesting happening is that the game would crash after about 2 minutes of a fight created via the battle editor. It started with getting reports from the other team member that the game would crash non-stop, which was kind of a shock to me because it didn’t crash on my side (for about a week now it has been very stable on my pc). When I can’t replicate an issue it worries me a lot, because its something I can’t fix/solve easily.

But luckily Drew sent over the instant action file that would trigger the crash and it crashed on my side as well. This is good news because if a bug/issue can be replicated then it can be fixed. Long story short: it turned out to be a crash due to the game using up its max allowed memory. The cause was particle effects, recently we’ve added a debri effect on explosions and impacts. These tended to linger for a decent amount of time while they float and spin away from whatever it is that exploded. The game engine is designed to re-use particles, but only if they stopped playing in the game world, if there aren’t any avaiable particles then the engine creates a new one, well if the debris were lingering then the particle system wasn’t stopped so new ones were being created, until a crash due to running out of memory. Interesting and new problem.

For now the band aid is to cap the amount of particle systems that can be created, but later on a more sophisticated solution will take place. Seperating the debris effect from the explosion effect so, because really they are somewhat independent is a start, testing distance to the player’s ship is another, and also putting limits on the amount of particles created.

Lots of things are happening behind the scenes, getting ready to release iter 11, ETA: next weekend. New models – ships, stations, etc. New tutorials. New effects, new sounds. Old ships removed, old files cleaned up. A re-vamped gui/interface and many other aspects.

The game is looking very nice and this enhances testing and makes me want to code/do more.

Very much looking forward to sharing it with you guys.