Category: gratuitous space battles

One of the big problems with Kudos and Democracy (my two best selling games so far) is that they are basically fixed resolution games. Democracy 1 supported two resolutions, and you can always hack them by fiddling with config files, but basically those games assumed a certain size screen and didn’t scale up or down.

With Gratuitous Space Battles, I’m aiming to support both people with huge monitors, and hopefully people with small laptops, running 600 pixel high screens.

That will mean some major fiddling with the ship and fleet design screens, and the pre-battle deployment screen too. The big probloem will be those 600 pixels. Of course, I could do some super-dynamic scaling thing, but it’s not nice reading text designed for 1900×1200 on a 600 pixel height laptop.

What I probably need is a number of different windowed layouts for different size monitors. The battle screen will be easy, because it already happily scales without any issues.

So if the fixed resolutions of Democracy 2 and Kudos 2 bugged you, don’t worry, I’m fixing it this time :D

BTW, I released a free add-on mini-patch to Democracy which adds a new dilemma for banking bonuses:

I’ve finally got code written that supports the same ship module having different sprites on different spaceships. What this means is that the same weapon (fast pulse laser) can look different on a rebel ship to a federation ship, so hopefully they don’t ever look too out of place.

This works fine, but right now I’m assuming I’m using the same hi-res 3d image for the weapon on the ship design screen, regardless of which ‘race’ the ship hull is from. I have several ways to fix this, none of which are ideal…

I could have different 3d renders for each turret on the ship design screen, depending on the race of the ship hull. This is a lot of work, and also might be confusing. Shouldn’t the player be able to recognise a pulse laser icon regardless what race he plays?

I could have a generic 3d image for the design screen, but represent it differently on each ship, which is easier, but it means breaking the visual connection between the 3d render and the 2d sprite which might be confusing.

I could scrap the idea of the turrets representing individual variations, and just have 3 or 4 turrets for the battle screen, and tons of different 3d ones for the design screen.

I really like the idea that placing a turret in the design screen reflects exactly what the ship will look like in battle. However, it doesn’t really matter in gameplay terms, and ease of use on the design screen is the most important thing. Maybe I keep all the data the same, but have different sprites and 3d renders depending on the selected ship hull. In any case, there is tons of 3d modelling, rendering and data entry to do…

I got the code in today for ships to escort others, and for formations. There is a very clunky ugly GUI for setting it up, which needs fixing at some point.

Basically, in the deployment stage before a battle, you can add orders to each ship which will instruct them to escort or fly in formation to a specified other ship. If that ship is destroyed, the orders get ignored. Escorting is the same as saying “Do what you want (according to other orders) but dont get more than x meters from this ship.” Formation is the same as saying  “Always remain at this exact offset in X and Y terms from the specified ship”. The formations are in world space, not relative to the parent ship, and this seems to work best.

It seems to work (although I havent’ tried fighter formations yet), and I can see already it will lead to much more strategy in the game. You can set up ships to be flanked by other ships with anti-fighter lasers, thus providing a screening layer for a cruiser which might have invested in big guns and not have room for anti-fighter modules.

Plus a group of cruisers or frigates flying in formation looks pretty cool, especially after I fixed a silly bug which meant 75% of the laser bolts were not getting drawn. It’s real mayhem now :D

At last I’ve got around to adding laser turrets to the ships, so the beams don’t seem to blast out of just anywhere any more. I’ve also added support for multiple beam origins per weapon, and for them to be different to where the module is placed on the ship design blueprint. This leaves the blueprint looking functional, whilst allowing me to spam a few laser turrets on the bigger ships. It also means you can have a battery of lasers that all zap at once. Maybe eventually I’ll introduce minor delays or other cleverness to make them seem more independent.

There isn’t really a connection between the weapon type and the number of turrets you get with it, but it has no gameplay effect, and is purely visual. So some ships have a slot that links to multiple turrets, and placing a beam laser there will ‘spawn’ multiple turrets, whereas the same weapon on a different ship gets just one.

I don’t think it matters, there is zero connection between the two phenomena in Eve online, and it doesn’t seem to bug people. The main thing is, it looks cool, and I hope, somewhat gratuitous: