Category: game design

“Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.”

That’s what wikipedia has to say. In terms of gsb determinism would mean that if you field the same fleet twice, against the same enemy, then the result will be exactly the same.

This isn’t true.

I wish it was, as do a few GSB players who are doing great things with tournaments. In fact, if I knew that I could make the game work as well as it does now, but be deterministic with a weeks work, I’d do it. Sadly, the reasons why it is not deterministic go deeper than that. I spent most of today experimenting with making it work, and I never got past 6000 milliseconds of a big battle before losing synch. (Yes I know all about random seeds and how to do it. If you saw how much code is the game, you’d see the scale of the problem :()

Fundamentally, the game is not frame-rate independent in terms of simulation calculations. (although it is scaled so as to provide constant playback rates). The BIG BIG plus side of this is that games visuals are pretty darn smooth and look great, with no jitters or jumps like you sometimes see in laggy multiplayer games. The downside is it’s not deterministic.

This limits the game a bit in terms of being really competitive as any sort of online serious league style thing. However, thats not altogether a problem. The game is called GRATUITOUS space battles, and isn’t designed to be taking uber seriously. I’d love to code an ultra-complex, ultra-geeky dterministic space combat game where you even selected the rivets to use on the laser gun stabiliser panels, but the trouble is it would likely see 500 copies, and that means I’d be broke :(

Sooo…. The current limitations of GSB 1 which will always be there are these:

2D. Not 3D

No direct ship control

Not deterministic.

Everything else can be improved and expanded and bettered and tweaked. What would you like to see?

<offtopic rant>

I’m watching (as-in, it’s on in the background) masterchef. With the way these people talk, and the ominous sci-fi thriller music as they talk about cooking prawns, they take themselves waaaayyyy too seriously. I know my place, I make video games to entertain people, and play with spaceships for a living. You can do that, and take it very seriously and aim to be the best you can, without building up some big fucking hero-complex. These people are good at frying, they arent discovering DNA or serving as fucking fighter pilots. Bah! </offtopic rant>

I have a mental trigger than once I’m past 11 things on the ‘recent bug fixes and improvements’ list then I need to get off my ass and release a new patch for all you lucky beta players of Gratuitous Space Battles.

So hopefully some time earlyish tomorrow I’ll be doing that with version 1.13. Here is what will be in it:

1) Fixed bug where power consumed can seem to equate to power produced but still be shown to be invalid on ship design screen
2) New feature : new minimap-button and hotkey ‘O’ turns on or off a green/red overlay to show friend or foe ships.
3) Fixed bug where the size of a ship-destruction shock wave varied based on your zoom level at the time of detonation
4) The option to turn off repair-drone effects now actually works correctly
5) Better repair drones, in that they have better weld effects, and actually carry out visible repairs so ship’s damage now reflects their true status much better
6) Added tooltips to the options
7) Added a new ‘hardware sounds’ option you can disable on options if you want pitch shifting sounds without slowdown at fast speed and have certain sound cards”
8) Added a new button on the deployment screen that lets you read all of the restrictions and spatial anomalies for this mission.
9) Added some better spatial anomalies
10) Fixed bug where tutorial got stuck at ‘select orders’
11) Various scenario deployment changes to take into account the new spatial anomalies
12) Missiles that are en-route whilst their target explodes will now autodestruct rather than fly on aimlessly (regardless of missile type).
13) Fixed major bug involving engine modules where damage to an engine module is ignored until the next time the ship is damaged (should make fighters more vulnerable)
14) Rebel atlantis bomber now has it’s drifting space hulk triggered
15) Attempting to load a design of ship into the editor that is invalid now gives a nicer, in-game error rather than a crash!
16) New delete button on file opening windows lets you delete existing ship designs and deployments.

It’s the usual mixture of minor niggles like 1) and usability stuff like 2) plus big enhancements such as 5) which I already blogged about. The big ones here are definitely 5) and 9). You might enjoy trying out the emerald nebula again, and the last skirmish mission, as these now have some more interesting spatial anomalies. Hopefully this will make for some good new challenges too, because people who hate fighters or love frigates can now have their fun.

Also, fighters have been nerfed a bit, partly by huge balance change improvements to anti-fighter missiles (not listed here), but also more subtely by 13). This means that it’s all fun and giggles in your high speed mega fighter until you take a single lucky hit. Then you are just some slowly drifting piece of metal with ‘target’ written on your ass.

Today I released version 1.12 of GSB. That fixes a ton of AI stuff, and a lot of minor UI niggles. It is pretty handy that beta testers compile lists of little UI things they notice (that as developer, you tend to become blind to).

Fixing bugs is relatively stress free, it just takes time and effort, and concentration. Improving Ui stuff, new features and new graphics are all quite stress free too. The really scary stuff seems to be balance changes. Everyone who plays the game uses different tactics, and no matter what you test, the nanosecond you release the new patch, people find some cunning way to design ships that takes advantage of a loophole you hadn’t even thought of.

That sort of stuff is inevitable with a game that involves competition, but it does make it pretty scary and time consuming to ever change anything. I concluded that missiles were not good enough, and that fighters flew too fast, but there are a dozen ways to fix both those issues, and every change has its side effects. Still, the game is much better balanced and playable that it was on first release, and despite minor niggles, I do think that on the whole it gets better with each patch. (If not, I’m wasting my life!)

In other news I added a flash widget to the GSB website that scrolls through images. It cost me actual real money! I’m no flash expert, so buying a pre-made component was worth it for me. I normally don’t like flash on websites, because it seems a bit gratuitous but…