Monthly Archives: August 2012

Happenings – gotta come up with a better generic post title

The past two weeks were very busy “real life” wise. Me and my wife painted the living/dining rooms (including the ceelings) – about a week ago, and after the cleanup and some other real life getting in the way (some of them very nice) of game development deals.

Anyway this weekend was a bit of a catchup on doing “nothing”, partly to blame was the rain all day today weather. But this meant that I had a very good productive game development weekend during which I worked on the “gate travel” system. Basically right now there are “rock gates” in the game out of which ships of the “Outsider” faction come into the “sector” and cause trouble. To add variety to the game and to have a more interesting story and elements I always intended the player to be able to travel via these gates as well. So right now the player is able to activate/deactivate these gates for travel and pass through the gate. Which right now results in a panning back of the camera and the ship speeding off into the void and then the ship is removed form the game world.

This took a bit of a engine re-design, basically adding a collision object class. A collision object (as opposed to a physical object) isn’t shown in anyway on the screen yet ships can still collide with it. Basically its an invisible square/rectangle. When a ship collides with it something will trigger. Right now the gate travel – but in the future other possibilites are on the table, for example mission triggers, objectives (eg: go to position), weapons (flak/granade weapons), and even a push back on a ship blowing up within a certain radius. Lots of interesting stuff I hope.

Next up is having a new map load and the ship exiting the new map’s gate.

Gate travel has a lot of interesting possibilities and it brings a lot of complecities, right now I’m trying to take it one step at a time and see where it leads.

Happenings

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.