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

Category: gratuitous space battles

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?

GSB 1.29 and some stuff for next time

Posted on January 7, 2010

I’ve turned attention away from long term expansion pack (campaign) stuff today to get patch 1.29 released for the core game. If you have entered an on-line code the game will autopatch sometime over the next 24 hours. If not, you will have to wait until I push the patch out to steam, gamersgate etc. People who kindly bought direct (the really cool people) can redownload the whole game if they really want to, or wait for the auto-patch.

The changes are thus:

1) Fixed a number of typos (thanks david!)
2) Game now automatically creates a new almost-empty default design if you delete every ship design, to prevent empty design list crash.
3) The range circles are now also shown on the currently dragged ship on the deployment screen
4) Fixed display bug where the tooltips over the deployment screens ship blueprints didn’t take race and ship bonuses into account.
5) Fixed crash bug when changing races before you have ever viewed the choose mission screen.
6) Fixed bug relating to messages corrupting or not being deletable.
7) Tweaked the expert fleet for the multari mission to make them harder.
8) Added a new rebel ship hull -> The Midgard frigate.
9) Made the startup online message check multi-threaded, to speed up startup times.

Also, I changed a server setting so that up to 2,000 challenges get downloaded when you hit refresh, so that means less ‘where the hell is my challenge’ mysteries. A longer term fix will happen one day.

In other news, I just put this in (for patch 1.30). It’s a new bit of UI that shows you the shield strength of individual shield modules.

Sometimes lucky enemy shots can skew the damage to one module more than another, meaning you can have one shield taken out, and the others intact, even though physically the modules aren’t destroyed. That effectively permanently reduces your max shield strength, as each module effectively acts like a concentric mini-shield in it’s own right. This was not clear, so hopefully this UI can at least let you spot it happening such as in this situation where the leftmost shield is on low strength, but the rightmost one is taken out.

Coding for the sake of elegance

Posted on January 4, 2010

I’m working on campaign stuff for a future (long way off) GSB expansion pack.

Right now, when the player clicks the battle screen to show the missions, there is an extra “campaigns” tab, and when that screen is initialised, the game currently loads in all the campaign data, including data for all the encounters within each campaign.

That doesn’t take very long tbh, it’s fairly negligible, even in debug mode.

Yet I am determined to fix it. I can just load the campaign name, and only bother loading further data if that campaign gets selected, and the player goes to the next screen. Otherwise, I’m wasting time.

Back in the days of the ZX81, that sort of delay would be very long, slow and totally unacceptable. It would be hugely wasted processing to load any data you didn’t really need, regardless of how much effort it took or complexity was involevd to avoid it. These days, it really doesn’t matter so much. We have more than 1k of RAM, we have more than a million times as much.

And yet it still bugs me. The code is inelegant, and I must fix it. Like most games programmers > 30 years old, I’ll never shake that desire to code ‘close to the metal’ and get as much performance as I can, even in fairly unimportant scenarios like this. Maybe it’s a good thing? Maybe thats why GSB surprises people sometimes in how well it runs on crappy old PC’s :D.

Collosal space battles (in fuschia)

Posted on December 31, 2009

Aren’t TV and movie space battles a bit tame?

Take the battle of Waterloo. It contained approx 140,000 soldiers. The battle of Kursk was 900,000 Germans vs 1,300,000 Russians, complete with 3,600 tanks and 20,000 guns. This was a big battle between two countries in a world war, fought over 50 years ago, when the world population was smaller.

Imagine a modern day non-nuclear war between China and Russia on one side, and everyone else on the other side. Now picture it as a purely naval battle. How many people would be involved? Lets say conservatively that each side only fielded 2 million troops (a trivial subset of fit, able potential combatants). Lets look at a big US battleship : The USS Massachusetts has approx 2,000 crew involved. Lets assume only 10% of our navy serve on these big ships (200,000 men) so thats 1,000 battleships, in an all out naval war. (remember we are talking a war for survival, not the relative peacetime deployments of today).

That’s a large fight between two earth-bound nations.

But lets assume a planet with less water-coverage than earth, and slightly larger, so it has double our population. Thats a factor of two. Now fast forward another two generations time wise and assume a doubling of that population again. Thats x4. Now assume that they are all on the same side (x6) and that they form part of a federation of 20 such worlds (still an incredibly small speck in an average size galaxy). Thats 120 x 1,000 battleships.

What I’m getting at, is when the Rebel Alliance attacked the death star, they seemed to do it with the sort of navy you would use to maybe lay siege to Malta, or at best, to attack Dieppe. Hardly a clash of galactic powers.  Assume 20% of your 240,000,000 are in fighters and thats suddenly 12,000,000 fighters, or a million twelve man squadrons. Imagine how long “all wings report in” would take… Imagine how quickly you run out of colors?

“Peach-tinted fuschia leader standing by”, “Oaky pastel rose leader standing by…”

So I guess that issue, and the whole problem of ILM filming a million plastic model flybys in 1983 doesn’t help.

I know what you are thinking, Even Gratuitous Space Battles isn’t really gratuitous enough is it? Maybe for the sequel…