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

Category: game design

Taking Direct Control

Posted on July 10, 2009

I’ve had a lot of people saying they love the hands-off battle idea, and a sizeable minority expressing concern that this will get old fast. In addition, when playing the game, I’m realising that no pre-battle orders are ever going to be fine enough to prevent you feeling occasionally frustrated at your AI captains, so I’ve decided to give-in and add some element of mid-battle control.

Now this would normally break the play-by-email style challenge system, but in challenge games (where you are playing against another player’s downloaded fleet) direct-control is simply disabled, and the battle reverts to view-only.

I’m not going overboard in terms of making an entire RTS out of the game, but currently you can single select or drag-select some ships, and then right click an enemy ship, or a position on the map and they attack/move as instructed. Green overlaid ships are selected, the red one is the current target. You can issue orders whilst the game is paused, for extra fine control.

Most of the battles have enough ships that you will not play it like an RTS, but just use the direct control stuff to fine tune your general battle plan. Sometimes ships come under more intense fire than expected, and you might want them to beat a hasty retreat to engage auto-repair modules. Sometimes you spot that a specific enemy ship is kicking interstellar ass and you may want to concentrate your fire there.

I’ve also been improving the AI. Weapons that fire >4 times in 7 seconds at a target and have no effect, will automatically select a different target for a few seconds. This prevents the dilemma where you have a set of ships just facing each other and blasting away ad-finitum achieving nothing. The chances of hitting a shop have also been skewed so that big ships are easier to hit, meaning fighters and frigates should last longer into the battle than they currently do.

Trying to improve armor glow effect

Posted on July 4, 2009

Several people commented on the armor ‘glow’ effect to represent an armor hit, but not hull damage or a shield hit. Ideally the effect says “this hit the ship and got through shields, but it didn’t get any further’. my plan was for the ship to look like it ‘glowed’.
The problem was, that with the whole ship glowing, it looked a bit overdone, and non-specific. After a lot of fiddling, I can apply an expanding and fading sprite as a ‘decal’ to the ship (which is fiddly without assuming shader support, and involves some interesting multi-texturing code and so on…)
Here it is: ( i stupidly called it shield effect test. it’s armor effect. doh!)

Is this better? If not, what would work better?
Cheers!

Lightning!

Posted on July 2, 2009

I’ve been tweaking and fixing a few small things lately, sounds that do not play, some graphical problems, and some bugs caused by recently introduced new features (I managed to screw up the way shields worked when I added cod to make ‘stacked’ shields less effective.

In amongst this, the only true ‘new’ feature that has gone in is the alliance ‘lightning gun’. It’s basically just a beam laser, but drawn entirely differently. 10 minutes of reading photoshop tutorials got me up to speed with rendering lightning, and then a bunch of rendered strips of lightning later, I wrote code which works out how many ‘chunks fit in a beam, and stuck together a string of them so the ship looks like its electrocuting its enemies.

The code isn’t that simple, because you want the beam to zig zag everywherem, but hit its origin and target exactly, which is a bit fiddly. I also had it change which bits of lightning to use every 10th of a second so it looks like it flickers, and had to ensure that multiple beams from the same ship start at different points so you can’t tell the same texture pattern was being used.

Having said all this, the biggest effort was picking out a sound effect for it, which I’m still not happy with and am not confident is playing right. 30 minutes of previewing sounds of electrical static is a bit wearisome in 86 degrees in the indoors with an overheating PC by your legs.

All good fun I guess.

How shields do (and will) work

Posted on June 28, 2009

Every space movie has deflector shields, and so does GSB. here is the current system:

You can optionally add shield generators to your ships. The more the merrier, and some provide more shield points than others. The total shield points get added together as the shield strength. This strength needs top be blasted to zero to knock out the shields. In this respect, all generators act as a linked unit.

3% of weapon hits somehow luckily get through the shields anyway (luke skywalker lucky shots)

Shields have strength, but also resistance, and weapons have shield damage, and shield penetration. If shield resistance > shield penetration, the weapon is totally ineffectual. Otherwise, shield damage is applied to shield strength

Shields recharge over time. You need to totally blast a ships shield strength to zero to stop it recharging.

Now for the new bit (working on it now…)

Shields will have ‘stability’ which indicates the integrity of the energy field. Special weapons (probably torpedoes) will be able to interfere with the stability. If the stability is reduced to zero, the shields will temporarily collapse, effectively turning them off and allowing weapons to penetrate. These shield disruptor weapons will ignore shield strength and resistance, working on totally different principles. The only defence against them will be point defence lasers and ECM beams to scramble the torpedoes.

This way I’m avoiding the possibility of just havign seriously ‘shielded-up’ ships that are effectively impossible for enemy ships to overcome. Another possibility I’m toying with is preventing shield generator modules from being 100% additive, but maybe on a sliding scale.

So 1 shield module = 100% of its strength, 2nd shield module adds 80% of its strength, etc etc.

Thoughts?

Better Damage Effects

Posted on June 25, 2009

I have a vaguely usable hacked together damage editor which means I can make a few improvements to the ships now. I’ve only done 1 so far, but with the tools in place the rest shouldn’t take more than a day. Here is a screenshot showing a federation cruiser and the changes:

A) This shows that some damage has knocked out the lighting on the warp nacelle. This is actually just visual and does not correspond to engine damage, that would be a nightmare, but it still looks better than them staying on :D Also, two of the tiny orange lights have been knocked out by another hit (bottom A)

B) These tiny impact ‘scars’ are new. By having a lot of these scattered around the ship, the targets selected by enemy ships seem less predictable and more random, although they are pre-assigned in truth, and then scrambled in order.

C) My editor lets me easily add ‘permanent’ smoke or spark effects to each damage texture, so they don’t seem too similar. Most major impacts result in a complex smoke and flames emitter anyway, but only some of those smoke effects stay around for the lifetime of the ship.

This screenshot was taken using my debugging hacks, so it’s not really representative. Normally a ship hit this much would be flying through a lot of debris and maybe hulks from other ships, so it would look a bit better :D

Comments?