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[Lemunde]

How would the heatsinks work?
(In physics terms, I mean.)
Would they concentrate waste heat in some sort of coolant and eject it, or would they radiate it, or what?

Typically heatsinks are designed to absorb heat from a connected component and radiate it away as efficiently as possible, typically through a large amount of exposed surface area.

In gameplay terms I would probably just have the heatsink directly raise the maximum temperature of the connected component. The heatsink would also share whatever heat value the connected component has. However I doubt there would ever be a circumstance where the heatsink would fail due to overheating before the connected component did. Hell, in order for it to fail it'd basically have to melt.

Would the radiated heat be able to affect other ships, or would it be too diffuse to be worth calculating?
(Although if it is diffuse, it might be fine to leave it in, just so players can try to overheat an enemy ship with their heat sinks.)

Unfortunately heat doesn't work that way in the vacuum of space, unless it's being emitted in the form of light like from the sun. Otherwise it needs a medium such as air or water to travel through. Some heat is emitted through infrared radiation but it's not strong enough to have a significant effect on anything other than an infrared camera.

In any case, the way the game controls right now, you'd never be able to stay close enough to an enemy ship for your ship's heat to have an effect on it anyway. It'd be like a jet fighter trying to burn a wing of another fighter with his engine during a dogfight. Even if he was willing to sit there long enough maintaining that level of control would be a total pain.

In other news I managed to set up a system for internal components and have a cargo hold component partially in place, though I haven't set up any of the variables so it can hold cargo yet. I'll need to add items to pick up before I can flesh it out more.

[Tsuchigumo550]

Heatsinks could be a part that simply add max heat value/ slow heating of a component, or components around them, and thus they could be shot off. Coolant systems would be more integral, and you'd have to destroy the part to destroy the coolant system.

[Lemunde]

Regarding how cargo holds and items are going to work, each cargo hold on your ship will have it's own inventory.

There's two variables you have to consider when it comes to items in your cargo holds. The first is the item's size. This is what gets checked against your hold's capacity. If it goes over, obviously it won't go in. Then it will check to see if it will fit in the next hold, and the next and so on until you're completely out of room. You can choose which gets checked first by ordering them in the editor.

The second variable is the item's mass. There's no limit on the total mass your holds can carry, but it will add mass to your cargo holds and ultimately your ship. Depending on where your cargo holds are located, this could have a dramatic effect on your ship's center of gravity. I may make it where when you collect an item it tries to put it in the hold with the least used capacity. This will help even out the CG. However you'll still need to keep in mind that some holds have a larger capacity than others.

[Tsuchigumo550]

I suddenly want to make the most off balance as fuck ship ever. Huge cargo bay on one side, then a much smaller cockpit, the back has everything else.

[Lemunde]

I suddenly want to make the most off balance as fuck ship ever. Huge cargo bay on one side, then a much smaller cockpit, the back has everything else.

Most of the ships I've made so far have been pretty symmetrical, but there's nothing stopping you from doing that. In fact you could even out the balance by either moving your engines around or adding lighter equipment to the other side but much further out.

[Tsuchigumo550]

Oh man, you're doing the "farther away more weight" thing. Do want.

[GalenEvil]

Excited to hear that you have balance and, I assume, location based torque forces in the works I have been working on a similar system for my 3D space game and would like to hear more about how you are implementing it. Are you doing it with center of mass calculations and relative positions of engines to the center of mass?

[GreatWyrmGold]

How would the heatsinks work?
(In physics terms, I mean.)
Would they concentrate waste heat in some sort of coolant and eject it, or would they radiate it, or what?

Typically heatsinks are designed to absorb heat from a connected component and radiate it away as efficiently as possible, typically through a large amount of exposed surface area.

In gameplay terms I would probably just have the heatsink directly raise the maximum temperature of the connected component. The heatsink would also share whatever heat value the connected component has. However I doubt there would ever be a circumstance where the heatsink would fail due to overheating before the connected component did. Hell, in order for it to fail it'd basically have to melt.

Would the radiated heat be able to affect other ships, or would it be too diffuse to be worth calculating?
(Although if it is diffuse, it might be fine to leave it in, just so players can try to overheat an enemy ship with their heat sinks.)

Unfortunately heat doesn't work that way in the vacuum of space, unless it's being emitted in the form of light like from the sun. Otherwise it needs a medium such as air or water to travel through. Some heat is emitted through infrared radiation but it's not strong enough to have a significant effect on anything other than an infrared camera.

Hence why I said radiated.
In space, radiation is the only way to get heat to leave the ship, without expelling hot coolant or something.

In any case, the way the game controls right now, you'd never be able to stay close enough to an enemy ship for your ship's heat to have an effect on it anyway. It'd be like a jet fighter trying to burn a wing of another fighter with his engine during a dogfight. Even if he was willing to sit there long enough maintaining that level of control would be a total pain.

Ah well. It was a neat concept.

In other news I managed to set up a system for internal components and have a cargo hold component partially in place, though I haven't set up any of the variables so it can hold cargo yet. I'll need to add items to pick up before I can flesh it out more.

Excellent. If your cargo hold gets breached, will you be able to see your cargo go tumbling out into space, or will it not be tracked?

Oh, and by the way: Yay physics. This should be Fun to watch the unlearned masses play...

[Lemunde]

Excited to hear that you have balance and, I assume, location based torque forces in the works I have been working on a similar system for my 3D space game and would like to hear more about how you are implementing it. Are you doing it with center of mass calculations and relative positions of engines to the center of mass?

Yes. I forget the exact formula but it's something like move force = sin(thruster angle - angle to cg) * thruster power and the rotational force is the opposite of that times some multiplier. That's really all you need and everything else takes care of itself.

I added some test items around the planet for my ship to pick up. The ship I'm testing with has two cargo holds. I haven't had much time to test and I'll need to do some tweaking tomorrow but what I did discover is that if a ship designed to be around 70 tons picks up two objects around 100 tons each it's going to have a real hard time escaping a planet's gravitational pull. I also forgot to add a CG recalculation on item pickup so I'll have to fix that tomorrow.

I'm also going to tweak the controls tomorrow to be mouse based instead of keyboard based. I've used this before and it works really well. I was trying to hold off because I was afraid it'd take away from the realism but right now the ships are so hard to control it takes me forever just to collect an item floating around.

Excellent. If your cargo hold gets breached, will you be able to see your cargo go tumbling out into space, or will it not be tracked?

Yeah, you'll start losing cargo and you'll see it floating off into space. Not all at once, of course. I think somewhere around 30 percent damage you'll start seeing a small chance every second or so that cargo will fall out with the chance increasing up to 100 percent once your cargo hold is destroyed.

[Lemunde]

Did some extra tweaking and started applying weapons fire damage. Rather than have the projectile directly strike a specific component to apply damage to it, I set it up where only the hull components collide with weapons fire. Once a projectile strikes the hull, then it checks to see what the nearest non-hull component is and applies damage to it. Damage is simultaneously applied to all hull components as if they were one.

You might be asking why I decided to do it this way. The thing is there are many situations where a projectile will never be able to hit a component, especially internal components. Mainly because the projectile will always hit the hull first and once that's destroyed the ship is practically destroyed anyway. So now it's kinda like, hit the hull first and apply splash damage to a nearby component.

Another reason is it's just more optimized. Hull components only take up a small percentage of all the components on a ship and checking collisions against all of them is less than optimal.

Edit: Incidentally this opens up some possibilities for a new type of component: Armor plating. It's only function is to absorb damage so your other components don't. Just place them strategically on the outer portions of your hull.

I also adjusted the controls to use the mouse. Currently the left button turns the ship towards the mouse cursor and the right button applies forward thrust. The keyboard controls are still the same. In the future I may set it up where W and S is forward and back and A and D apply lateral thrust. This will make it control almost like a first person shooter. I'll have to get player feedback on that once the demo is released. Ideally the controls will be fully customizable but we'll see.

[Mephansteras]

Sounds cool!

[Lemunde]

Spent most of today working on an input box so players can name their ships, save files, etc. Also worked on some dev-mode stuff, trying to get it to where I can save and load ships to and from the ship template data file which will be used for AI ships and possibly ships sold at space stations.

[Tsuchigumo550]

If you want any ship design ideas at all, or want to hold a prizeless contest or whatever, you know where to ask~

[Guardian G.I.]

Posting to watch.

[Lemunde]

Gonna take a break from the interface stuff and focus on more game specific stuff for a while. Think I'll spruce up the effects today, maybe make some ships explode.