Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: game design

Radiation leak on deck twelve… bah…

Posted on January 13, 2010

I’ve been working yesterday and today on a new weapon, which is a threefold thing, because you have the simulation, the visual effect, and the balancing. The sim is moderately easy, the visual effect was a nightmare. I tried lots of things but ended up with a sort of greenish slimey effect that appears in blotches on the ships, which took a lot of code re-jigging, but looks good. I now have a more generic system for splatting one texture onto the surface of a ship, blending the source and destination alpha together so I can effectively splat a decal onto a ship. I was already hacking this in for the armor glows, now it’s more general. In theory, I could have done the damage textures that way… It’s all done without shaders, so even really old PC’s will still see that effect.

Anyway, the new weapon (likely for a new expansion one day) is a radiation gun. In game terms, this is a weapon that is rubbish at shield penetration, does little impact damage and has really slow rate of fire… So why bother?
Because if it makes it through to the ships internals, it delivers a radioactive payload which keeps ticking. Over a period of time, the payload causes repeated damage internally to different modules. This continues even if the original firing ship is no more, or the shields go back up.
Effectively its like gambling and throwing all your shots into one payload. If it hits, they all hit. and their damage is distributed across the whole target. You can damage every module on a ship with one hit. Yay!

I think this is interesting tactically for several reasons:
1) ‘sacrificial’ ships with tons of weapons but sod-all defences are now viable, because they only need to get a few shots in at the right time. They can then go bang! their work is done…
2) shield disruptor bombs are now more useful, because coupled with radiation payloads, they can deliver a one-two punch.
3) it’s a slight counter to the tribe, who trade armor and shields for more internal hit-points. Radiation could be their undoing, and negates their ‘big tank’ strategy.
4) It adds the first gradual weapon, meaning that if you can deliver this initial attack, just staying alive and waiting actually can be a winning strategy.
5) it adds a reason to have minimal shielding. People ignore the really cheap shield modules, but now that will leave them open to radioactive weaponry.

Of course it’s all in the final balancing. thoughts?

Asteroids for now… moving onwards

Posted on January 11, 2010

I’m already on other stuff now, but with a bit of shader depth of field (subtle, but worth it) and the rare laser blast impact, and a bit of knocking them sideways with explosions, I’m done with asteroid belts for now. They will show up in an expansion at some point. There is a ton of other stuff to do next.
Doing the belts meant looking at all sorts of code and led me down paths which have meant improvements to performance in other areas. It’s always good to claw back some CPU or GPU, knowing there is a big list of stuff I want to add which can use it up again :D

ASTEROIDZ!

Posted on January 8, 2010

After watching some star trek online gameplay videos (everyone says it sucks, but the space battles look interesting) I thought I should experiment with asteroid fields in GSB, purely (for now) as a visual effect, just a gratuitous bit of visual fluff which all the ships and weapons ignore.

Anyway, I don’t like just putting stuff in the game until I’m really happy with it. I’m not happy with this yet

But I’m not sure why. I need feedback on it from people like YOU. What looks wrong? what could be improved? Adding shadows is the obvious thing, but for boring technical reasons it would be a HUGE big deal in performance terms. I’d already have done it for ships if it was easy or fast.

Given that adding shadows isn’t an option, what else could be done to make this look more gratuitous and movie-like?

Scenario Editor

Posted on December 15, 2009

I’m a big fan of modding and game editors. people love to tweak a game they way they want it, and I support that 100%. So with this in mind, here is a work-in-progress screenshot of the custom scenario editor.

The idea is that there is a new way to launch a challenge (maybe from the challenges window), rather than selecting an existing singelplayer mission. That new button takes you to this screen which lets you tweak everything. Once done, you can then click deploy, and arrange your fleet like any other mission, then issue that as a challenge to anyone else. You can only use backgrounds that already exist in the game, but everything else is tweakable.  The only big chunk not done yet is changing the deployment zones. I may end up adding that later and using defaults for now. My UI coding is sadly slow and inefficient :(

Together with in-game messaging, this is the second big feature that will be in the next patch (alongside many bug fixes) which will be 1.28

Online integration fun

Posted on December 9, 2009

You know what’s missing in GSB?

Yes, yes I know you want a big 4x style campaign game built around it. ONE DAY maybe, but certainly not by the end of the week. One thing that is not quite so huge and unwieldy for a short term project is the area of online community.

Player A reads a forum post by player B, and decides to issue them with a challenge that proves their point that tribe frigates kick ass. Player B is oblivious, unless they happen to be browsing the challenges and spot they have a new one, from that player. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if every time someone issued a challenge to you, beat your challenge, or played (and presumably lost) your challenge, the game knew about it, and collected those messages for you to review at your leisure?

So rather than having to go to challenges, filter by personal and check if anything looks new, you could have a little spangly message popup saying “you have new messages“, on the main menu, and clicking there would tell you what’s new in your world of GSB.

This sort of stuff isn’t *that* evil to code, even though it involves server-side stuff. I already have it all up and running, UI and all, and the server is currently processing messages as I speak (although nobody has  a game version that lets them see them yet. But I can tell that a bit earlier, superneals sent a new challenge to knightsofni, for example.)

This will go into version 1.28. At the moment it’s system generated messages, so you just get pre-defined text messages notifying you of events. If people liek it, I think it would be awesome to be able to win a challenge, then type a message for the person you just beat saying “Ha!, i beat that fleet without even using plasma. I’ve responded with my winning fleet.” of course, you need to be able to block abusive / spam messages, but I’m working on that now. Besides, anyone spamming or being abusive will get the ban hammer :D