Category: gratuitous space battles

These are things on my list right now:

• Add new code to tutorial so it can zoom to a specified location.
• Finish off tutorial text and code for the remaining bits of the campaign.
• Do the screens for victory or defeat in the campaign.
• Filter out fleets where ships have no engines, so they aren’t selected as enemy fleets.
• Merge 2 fleets if you drop one fleet icon on another.
• Prevent exploit whereby you invade a system, then save and load before the battle got resolved. (Ooops).
• Merge two fleets into one if you send two fleets to invade the same system at the same time.

None of these are trivial tasks. It’s coming together though. I’ll probably interrupt work on this at some point to release patch 1.39, although the campaign itself will need a patch to support it, so I might wait until the campaign is finished first. I keep considering putting the campaign code into a separate DLL, but tbh thats only going to be needless grief. There will always be one or two tiny things I need to change in the base game to support all the campaign stuff, so why bother? The campaign is all seperate data, just like the expansion packs.
Sales of GSB are definitely slowing. Hopefully the campaign will boost them up long enough to last me until I finish whatever game I do next.

I’ve been slightly sidetracked recently by the release of the Swarm DLC on steam (few technical issues there) and some updates to the core game which will filter through in the eventual next patch. Meanwhile, slow but sure progress continues on the fun and games of the campaign game. Here is a current work-in-progress coder art style screenshot. I’ve just finished coding the ‘scrap ships’ UI so you can scrap ships to recover some of the money. You only get 25% of the value, so it’s a desperate measure rather than a simple way to refit the fleet. It might be useful for when you have damaged ships not worth repairing, or for when you capture enemy ships that don’t suit your current fleet.

In other news, I now no longer find the big clump of black birds that live in a tree in our garden to be cute. Bastard things woke me up at 6AM this morning. I suspect they are ravens, or maybe pterodactyls. Certainly not as cute as I recall. Jack now has my express permission to get the bastards. He’s been practicing on the smaller birds. So far it’s about 5:0 to him. Nature eh?

Just a quick screenshot showing the state of the current campaign game UI. This is zoomed in on a planet to show the fleets there, the UI for building new ships and the list of facilities there. It’s all very coder-art and work-in-progress. I’ll likely not do the icons myself.

It is getting there though…