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[Anvilfolk]

Hey all,

So I was browsing Kickstarted again, looking for places to throw money at, and came across ScrumbleShip. It looks like something similar to Blockade Runner (i.e. Minecraft in space), with tekkit-like complexity. This makes it vuuury exciting.

On the other hand, it's done by one guy whose ego has gone way through the stratosphere, and I honestly don't know whether development will grind to a halt as the dev realizes he's bitten off more than he can chew.

Does anyone know more about this? I'll be trying the demo soon.

[Leatra]

Not sure if I like the art style.

And you are not kidding about the ego thing.

One excellent estimate of how much work I've already put into ScrumbleShip  is David A Wheeler's "SlocCount", which tells me I've written 16,000 lines of code. For an average C program, it estimates that this would take one person nearly 4 years to code, and cost a company around $500,000 to create.

I did it in one year.

But I think he just wrote that to show he is actively developing the game.

[yarr]

I wanna work for the company that gives me 125.000$/year for coding

[Anvilfolk]

My university projects were also worth tremendous amounts of money when I sloccounted them

Also, check his full bio (somewhere on the right).




I just tried the demo, and it's interesting. I don't know whether all the systems are working, because I place them but can't seem to interact with them, but the game was already giving me very low FPS for a pretty small ship. And this is written in C, supposedly the "fastest language" if you know what you're doing...

Still, it's the kind of thing where I was already imagining making a Battlestar Galactica, a Basestar, and that kind of thing

I'd sure as hell love to see this succeed though...

[dirkson]

Hi guys!

Dirkson is taken by a fey mood! He has claimed a computer crafting station. He is asking for food and rent. (Please don't wall me in. That's what I used to do whenever MY dwarves went insane)

Naw, work won't grind to a halt. I realized I've bitten off years and years of work. The only way I'm stopping at this point is if I get hit by a train or something- And I've even got a partial backup plan if THAT happens.

But I think he just wrote that to show he is actively developing the game.

Yup! You've hit the nail on the head. I tried to condense a few different articles into one for the Kickstarter, and I think it sounded much better in its original context. (I was giving users a first-year state of the game update) I've removed the monetary reference, and reworded it slightly, which I think helps. More feedback on that would be appreciated.

Still, it's the kind of thing where I was already imagining making a Battlestar Galactica, a Basestar, and that kind of thing

...But the game was already giving me very low FPS for a pretty small ship.

I'd love to see Battlestar Galactica in ScrumbleShip, particularly if you can find a way to make those lovely little fighters they had. Only fighters on TV or film that actually act like space fighters, rather than planes.

If you'd really like to see a horrorshow with the framerate, jump on our indiedb.com page and download the 0.10 version. We've got about as many optimizations ahead of us as we have behind us, though, so this should improve.

C IS pretty fast through - In the bleeding edge version, we have explosions, which use a very limited form of physics. Tens of thousands of collisions per second in real time on a single core is just downright impressive. It's not impressive because of anything I've done, though - I just implemented the naive algorithm, the speed is all C.

Cheers!
-Dirk

[miauw62]

As greatorder said, if you are going the "big physics" way, you'll have to spend long times optimizing the game, or else you'll have to make it a game for scientists with acces to supercomputers.
Pherhaps ways to turn off certain options, like the explosion simulation thing?

[The Fool]

Welcome to Bay 12 Dirkson!

Despite wanting a new computer anyways I think I would like to see some optimization as well. I noticed that you were lagging during your video.

I think I'll be joining the alpha testing. I've never played Minecraft, so building colossal voxel ships should be fun. I assume that ships can be saved and shared?

[dirkson]

Thanks for the welcome, guys! This account has actually been around since 2008, I just don't use it much. Dwarf fortress is one of my favorite games of all time- In fact, ScrumbleShip was originally going to feature an ASCII interface and dwarves

I'm going to be somewhat frank, by the sounds of things, 'SloccCount' overestimates the funding and time needed, and your ego needs reducing slightly.

It might! And it might!

Your idea of how battles will go is exactly what I imagined! Assuming I can pull this off, it's going to be pretty epic.

As greatorder said, if you are going the "big physics" way, you'll have to spend long times optimizing the game, or else you'll have to make it a game for scientists with acces to supercomputers.
Pherhaps ways to turn off certain options, like the explosion simulation thing?

We actually do spend a lot of time optimizing physics. For example, I have a whole system to turn off the heating algorithm on sections of ship where nothing is currently being heated.

And your idea to turn off the bounce for the explosions was so good I actually implemented it straight away. It's a hidden option for now, but setting "ExplosionBounce" to 0 in config/text/options will turn off all hit detection for explosion voxels. It's in the bleeding edge as we speak!

I think I'll be joining the alpha testing. I've never played Minecraft, so building colossal voxel ships should be fun. I assume that ships can be saved and shared?

Yup! Once you buy the game, a "Ships" button pops up on the website forums, and you can upload and download ships from there. I really appreciate the support.

Cheers,
-Dirk

[Leatra]

Welcome to the club dude! 4 years of inactivity doesn't count.

Graphics look kinda strange but I have a weakness for games similar to minecraft. I'll keep an eye on this game.

[Girlinhat]

This looks like a massive minecraft mod, which in itself is not a bad thing (ok maybe a little bad).  I can't help but go :/ though, as the video on kickstarter is... um...  "Heat spreads realistically" while butter doesn't melt.  The teaser video has FPS issues...

If it works out it looks to be fantastic.  Weapon dealings and localized damage can be amazing things.  The only thing I worry about is how the superstructure of a ship will handle.  I assume parts can be physically sheered off by weapon fire, but does that mean that 1 voxel thick pillar can support a whole engine?  If material stress isn't an issue, then realistic ship combat goes out the window.  After all, you could mount your weapon batteries on a pillar of soap butter and leave it far off from your ship, giving you an unusual firing range.  Via butter.  And perhaps more importantly, how will ships handle truly dwarven attacks?  If I ram an enemy ship, will it deal localized damage to those specific cubes, or will it send a shockwave of stress that cripples the whole ship?  If it's local, then striking your enemy in the middle will do no good.  If it distributes stress, then any spaceborne collision will be properly lethal to everyone involved.

[dirkson]

This looks like a massive minecraft mod, which in itself is not a bad thing (ok maybe a little bad).  I can't help but go :/ though, as the video on kickstarter is... um...  "Heat spreads realistically" while butter doesn't melt.  The teaser video has FPS issues...

If it works out it looks to be fantastic.  Weapon dealings and localized damage can be amazing things.  The only thing I worry about is how the superstructure of a ship will handle.  I assume parts can be physically sheered off by weapon fire, but does that mean that 1 voxel thick pillar can support a whole engine?  If material stress isn't an issue, then realistic ship combat goes out the window.  After all, you could mount your weapon batteries on a pillar of soap butter and leave it far off from your ship, giving you an unusual firing range.  Via butter.  And perhaps more importantly, how will ships handle truly dwarven attacks?  If I ram an enemy ship, will it deal localized damage to those specific cubes, or will it send a shockwave of stress that cripples the whole ship?  If it's local, then striking your enemy in the middle will do no good.  If it distributes stress, then any spaceborne collision will be properly lethal to everyone involved.

Oooh, this is a meat-and-potatoes question! Let's get to work!

First off, the reason the butter didn't melt in the video was because it had a sheet of aerogel between it and the heat source. For whatever reason, my engine decided to render the aerogel as a gas, but it still functioned the way it ought to, preventing heat from traveling through it. Look up aerogel if you're not familiar - It's amazing stuff.

You've actually hit on the idea that I like to call my "Force Engine". It's not completed yet, but the idea is to apply force throughout the ship when acceleration events happen - Strike a hull with a bullet? Ram the ship into an asteroid? Turn on an engine? Spread that force through the ship in a realistic fashion. A column of butter with an engine on it would rapidly shatter, smush, and/or melt depending on the factors at play.

Remember that humans can withstand peak G's of about 50, which gives you a lot of leeway to play with while ramming. I'm still not confident that ramming will be a valid battle tactic - At least not if you intend to survive the encounter! But there's always the equally-dwarven tactic of shoving a giant rock (asteroid) in front of you. Simply accelerate at your enemy and detach the rock!

I consider the force engine one of the major coding sections of ScrumbleShip. (The others being the renderer, the heat engine, multiplayer, and crew AI)

Cheers,
-Dirk

[10ebbor10]

50 G seems like quite an instant kill for me, if it last for more than a fraction of a second.

I believe something like 20 is the longest that can be sustained for multiple minutes. (Note that you're not going to do anything beside being crushed in a seat.)

[miauw62]

Nah, load your ship with explosives and go kamikaze.
Explosions galore.

[Girlinhat]

That, sounds promising then.  And while a human can survive 50 g's, the practical limit of doing anything tops around 5 or so, maybe 10 for a trained fighter pilot.  After that you just become disoriented and pinned to your seat/wall, you'll just survive because blood is still flowing.

Ramming should be possible, in the theoretical sense.  For that matter, nothing should be strictly impossible.  But I can already consider several ways to pull off a ramming attack without killing yourself in the process.  It's a viable tactic, but you'd have to really build your ship around the idea.  At the very simplest, making a core rod of something super-strong and then mounting a ram to the front of this rod, would let forces quiver harmlessly through the rod itself.  At the more complicated end of ramming weapons are crumple zones and disposable "pontoon" type appendages.  The trick isn't to avoid wrecking your ship.  The trick is to only have the disposable zones be wrecked.  Ramming attacks are merely a large weapon system.  Your ship is the gun and your impact zone is the projectile.  Projectiles aren't meant to be re-used.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm. Ok, I think I'm going to watch this for a bit. It has promise.