Category: gratuitous space battles

Ok, so new orders are something people often campaign for, and I like the idea of a ‘stay in attack formation” style order for fighters. So today, I went to implement that, and opened an entire canning-factory full of nematodes. I ended up re-writing the AI a bit so there is a definite concept of a fighter squadron (which I’d got by without, until now). The code gets involved, because each squadron needs a leader it can follow, and that leader needs to be re-elected in the case of the leader getting blown up, its engines shot down, caught in a tractor beam or limpet-mined. I need to test all of that works… Also I need code to assign slots in a general formation to each fighter, so they don’t bunch up too much, and look l33t when flying long distances,

I also needed to handle combinations of orders like ‘stick together’ and ‘formation’. I think they *do* need to work together, so you can have a fighter squadron sitting in formation at the rear, set to attack effectively only when their parent ship is destroyed, at which point they will then still stick together.

Of course, the big question is “is it best for the fighters to always stick together?” I suspect not, I suspect it depends if you want a bunch of general purpose dogfighters, or a coherent strike force. I like to think it’s a fine balanced decision, but only real life game testing and the eyes of a thousand GSB experts will tell. Here is a video showing how it’s looking right now:

I should probably add some suitable ‘stay in formation perkins!’ comms chatter too…

This isn’t finished yet, so this is just a work in progress screenshot, click it to enlarge…

This is new challenge UI stuff. I got sick of squeezing more columns in 1024 res on the list view, so now those download and delete buttons get replaced by ‘details’ which opens this new screen for a selected challenge. All the old data is here, with room for some more, and the history of that challenge is now auto-downloaded and displayed here at the top right. You can also now see the challenge ID in the titlebar, (I’ll probably add that to the list somehow too). there are two super-exciting new things:

• The challenges now uplaod a screenshot of their deployment, as you can see. Obviously old challenges will not have one, but new ones will. I’m very happy about this :D
• The challenges now have a parent, because when you win a challenge, you can send your fleet back as a ‘retaliation’. These get listed like any other challenge, but if you pick one of your challenges, you can see a list of it’s retaliations on the bottom window. I don’t have a super-threading view of it all, but this is a first step.

My plan for this is that

• Players will be able to see what a challenge looks like before downloading, which helps detect ‘spammy’ fleets for people who prefer not to play against them
• There will be a more on-going to-and-fro between players over who has the best fleet, using retaliations.

I still have more tweaks, and a ton of testing to do, to make this work well. I’m hoping the next patch will really improve the online stuff. Ideas and feedback are most welcome, as ever.