Ok so, I know this is probably not a big deal, or a new thing… but I have spent so long with this blog casually embedding youtube video links, that it took until today in 2026, and my desire to do what I can to de-couple my life as much as possible from US tech companies for me to discover that you can just natively embed an mp4 in wordpress! So anyway… I present the new race-selection screen animation effect in Ridiculous Space Battles!
and yes… before you comment, I know there is a bug with a texture changing wrongly when I scroll to the left. I’ll fix that tomorrow! I am however, pretty happy with this code, and this look. Coding stuff like this is harder than it looks, because to have everything seem smooth and crisp, you have to basically render all of those windows to an offscreen copy (with alpha) and then copy them as scaled sprites to the screen. That sounds simple, but its a lot of management, as you keep swapping render targets, and have to very smoothly transition from ‘offscreen pre-rendered sprite’ to proper rendered and full featured window.
Trust me, its a pain. It took a whole weekend. Well… it took all the hours I worked this weekend (which was not a lot TBH…). Anyway, that is one new thing that is in Ridiculous Space Battles. Another change was the re-colouring and some adjusting of the deployment screen to make it more user-friendly and less BRIGHT COLORS:
This definitely looks better. You can also see that the range indicators from my last blog post are in there with less angry colors too. The next big thing on my list is to balance the various weapons, and in fact before that, I need to code systems that really quickly run a lot of battles super-fast for me to gather stats. That will be a whole rabbit hole of code, but should be fun.
So to recap, the things left to do before early access or alpha-testing are to balance the modules, to put together the campaign fleets, to test the campaign, and to implement and test online challenges. No doubt lots of bug fixes and optimisation to do too, but I love the optimisation bit :D.