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[Tsuchigumo550]

Windows 7. A working copy of windows 7. It believes it has the most recent one, but also screams "YOU DON'T HAVE IT" as soon as it comes up. Updating does nothing. My desktop managed to work past it's problems and take the newest .NET, while my laptop sits in a corner and cries when it thinks about it.

[GalenEvil]

Which version specifically is the issue? I 'think' the newest version is 4.5, but not sure Haven't been making sure I have the latest versions for all runtimes heh.

[Tsuchigumo550]

4.5 is beta iirc, but 4.03013 or something. it has two 3s, two 0s, a 1, and a 4 at the front.

[Lemunde]

The latest version of XNA only requires .NET framework 4. XNA 4.0 refresh was published well over a year ago so I have a feeling a new version won't be coming out any time soon. Not that it would matter as far as my game is concerned. I'm not upgrading frameworks and possibly gumming up my game halfway through development. 4.0 kinda screwed some of my older projects out of ever being worked on again.

In other news, I worked on drawing some space station parts over my lunch break. Space stations will be using the same format as ships so most of the code will be the same. They just won't move. Much. Well, outside of orbits that is. That's the funny thing about space, everything is always moving. In fact, now that I think about it the only thing that won't me moving is the central star in the star system. Unless I throw in an imaginary super massive black hole a few thousand light years away but then I think things would start getting pretty ridiculous.

Edit: Also toying around with the idea of player owned space stations. The economy's not going to be as complex as what you might see in the X series games, just fixed commodities at varying prices depending on where you go. If you haven't played any of them, the X games have a living economy that's constantly changing. Ships bring in lots of power cells and the price drops way down. It's a nice concept but it's a lot for the player to have to keep up with. And since my game isn't going to be tracking every single ship across the entire galaxy all at once, it's just not going to happen. That's part of the reason the X games have such high system requirements.

Where was I? Space stations! So yeah, you could build space stations but not really to sell stuff from. I'm thinking something more like a base of operations where you can store your extra ships, ammo...slaves? I don't know. Still thinking on it. In any case this won't be something added until I start working on the full version.

[kytuzian]

In other news, I worked on drawing some space station parts over my lunch break. Space stations will be using the same format as ships so most of the code will be the same. They just won't move. Much. Well, outside of orbits that is. That's the funny thing about space, everything is always moving. In fact, now that I think about it the only thing that won't me moving is the central star in the star system. Unless I throw in an imaginary super massive black hole a few thousand light years away but then I think things would start getting pretty ridiculous.

While you are at it you can have every solar system's gravities act upon each other. And every planets. And all the space ships. And everyone's glasses.

That would be extremely cool, even if unfeasible.

[Tsuchigumo550]

WHY DO I HAVE TO KEEP ADJUSTING MY GLASSES

"Sir, we're next to the biggest planet in existence."

[Lemunde]

In other news, I worked on drawing some space station parts over my lunch break. Space stations will be using the same format as ships so most of the code will be the same. They just won't move. Much. Well, outside of orbits that is. That's the funny thing about space, everything is always moving. In fact, now that I think about it the only thing that won't me moving is the central star in the star system. Unless I throw in an imaginary super massive black hole a few thousand light years away but then I think things would start getting pretty ridiculous.

While you are at it you can have every solar system's gravities act upon each other. And every planets. And all the space ships. And everyone's glasses.

That would be extremely cool, even if unfeasible.

The funny thing is, programming it that way would be easy. Programming it so that the game doesn't run at 0.05 frames per second, that's the hard part.

Got a lot done before I went to bed. I can now use the ship editor to save ships to the template file. Got some angle and position snapping going on so it's much easier to make perfectly symmetrical ships now.

And a new video! http://youtu.be/qLNZ5_E2Ckk

[Lemunde]

Added in the faction system today. Had about 20 ships, two teams of 10, going at each other. The "BADGUYS" team won then turned their guns on me. I also added a feature where ships don't get hit by friendly fire. I may add an option to turn this off but right now teams have a bad habit of killing each other more so than their intended targets.

It looks like I'll also have to set a hard cap of 20 ships in combat at a time. I tried it with 100 and it was just too much for my processor to handle, probably because of all the projectiles flying around. That's 100 ships times 50 or so projectiles each, making it somewhere around 5000 projectiles checking collision against 100 ships, so that's...*does math*... half a million checks every frame.

20 ships in combat is actually quite a lot. Ideally I probably don't want more than 8 just to keep things from getting crazy. I'm probably looking at somewhere around 30 ships flying around in a system at a time, most of them just going from point A to point B or on a patrol route or something. I'm also going to tone down the lifespan of those projectiles. There's no reason a ship's weapon needs that kind of range unless it's a missile or something and missiles definitely won't have the same refire rate.

[GalenEvil]

Why are so you doing collision checks against ALL 100 ships? You can reduce the detail a little to check first the axis aligned bounding box (AABB) for the ship if it is in an area between the pre-frame location and the post-frame location. This would cull a lot of the ships from the list of what to check. If the projectile interacts with any AABBs then you would check the ship within that AABB to figure out if it actually hits and where it hits

Turning friendly fire off is definitely a good start, as well as keeping projectile lifespans down I have some missile ships that pretty well own everything around them since they fire off 6 missiles every few seconds, but the fighters they try to kill off are smart enough to guide the missiles into the trade ships that the missile ships are trying to protect, or into the missile ships themselves hehe. In my case, keeping friendly fire on is a good idea since it adds more depth to the combat system. Demonstration of this

[Lemunde]

Why are so you doing collision checks against ALL 100 ships? You can reduce the detail a little to check first the axis aligned bounding box (AABB) for the ship if it is in an area between the pre-frame location and the post-frame location. This would cull a lot of the ships from the list of what to check. If the projectile interacts with any AABBs then you would check the ship within that AABB to figure out if it actually hits and where it hits

Turning friendly fire off is definitely a good start, as well as keeping projectile lifespans down I have some missile ships that pretty well own everything around them since they fire off 6 missiles every few seconds, but the fighters they try to kill off are smart enough to guide the missiles into the trade ships that the missile ships are trying to protect, or into the missile ships themselves hehe. In my case, keeping friendly fire on is a good idea since it adds more depth to the combat system. Demonstration of this

Sorry, I didn't go into enough detail. Yes, I already have it optimized to use the bounding box checks first. I think the real problem was there were just far too many projectiles flying around at once, most of them not even on screen. There's plenty of room for more optimization once I get around to it.

The way the game is feeling right now I think it would be a better experience with fewer ships anyway. When you have too many targets it's hard to focus on strategy and instead rely on luck and key mashing to survive.

[GalenEvil]

Okay, hehe I completely understand that. In the game that demonstration is from I had to tone down the refire rates for the fighters by a loooot to get decent fps, and that's mostly just standard bullet physics stuff with a quick cast to see where it is going to be. Question! How far ahead are you checking to see if they hit something? The distance of a raycast can have a pretty drastic effect when combined with lots and lots and lots of projectiles. Also, since you are doing this in 2D have you considered using a Quadtree approach to keeping track of what objects are where? Each leaf in the tree would have a boundary square and a list of objects that fall within it. Since most of the time, as this is a space sim, the leaf would have nothing in it except maybe a projectile you would not need to do any collision checks for that leaf It could potentially also be turned into a parallel process which would allow you to shunt the work into threads and speed up the simulation even more to allow for larger numbers of simultaneous ship to ship battles even far offscreen. It is probably not what you are looking for but it if the need arises for a larger number of ships to be in an area then this could be a solution for it

What language is this in again? I can possibly throw something together to demonstrate this in C# today or tomorrow but I have no idea about other languages My skills in C++ are severely lacking at the moment hehe...

[MaximumZero]

Added in the faction system today. Had about 20 ships, two teams of 10, going at each other. The "BADGUYS" team won then turned their guns on me. I also added a feature where ships don't get hit by friendly fire. I may add an option to turn this off but right now teams have a bad habit of killing each other more so than their intended targets.

It looks like I'll also have to set a hard cap of 20 ships in combat at a time. I tried it with 100 and it was just too much for my processor to handle, probably because of all the projectiles flying around. That's 100 ships times 50 or so projectiles each, making it somewhere around 5000 projectiles checking collision against 100 ships, so that's...*does math*... half a million checks every frame.

What kind of rig do you have? I could test it out on mine [AMD 1045T 6-core Black Edition, 8GB RAM, Radeon HD 7850] for you. Purely for ‼SCIENCE‼, of course.

[Tsuchigumo550]

It's supposed to work on netbooks?

Last time I checked, netbooks have trouble with 100 words of ASCII text, let alone...

[Lemunde]

It's supposed to work on netbooks?

Last time I checked, netbooks have trouble with 100 words of ASCII text, let alone...

Believe it or not there are quite a few games that will run on a netbook. Nothing new like Skyrim or Mass Effect but older games like Diablo 2, Age of Empires 2, Halflife. Morrowind will run on mine but just barely. Freelancer for some reason runs flawlessly. Dwarf Fortress runs fine as long as you turn temperature off and keep the population low.

Okay, hehe I completely understand that. In the game that demonstration is from I had to tone down the refire rates for the fighters by a loooot to get decent fps, and that's mostly just standard bullet physics stuff with a quick cast to see where it is going to be. Question! How far ahead are you checking to see if they hit something? The distance of a raycast can have a pretty drastic effect when combined with lots and lots and lots of projectiles. Also, since you are doing this in 2D have you considered using a Quadtree approach to keeping track of what objects are where? Each leaf in the tree would have a boundary square and a list of objects that fall within it. Since most of the time, as this is a space sim, the leaf would have nothing in it except maybe a projectile you would not need to do any collision checks for that leaf It could potentially also be turned into a parallel process which would allow you to shunt the work into threads and speed up the simulation even more to allow for larger numbers of simultaneous ship to ship battles even far offscreen. It is probably not what you are looking for but it if the need arises for a larger number of ships to be in an area then this could be a solution for it

What language is this in again? I can possibly throw something together to demonstrate this in C# today or tomorrow but I have no idea about other languages My skills in C++ are severely lacking at the moment hehe...

Projectiles just use a single, stationary check for now. They don't really move fast enough to need more than that and I'm trying to keep tight control over the framerate. I may add some more strict checks once I get closer to release. As for the quadtree, probably a little overkill for my purposes. With all the internal physics and processes that are going on with each ship it's still in my best interest to keep the population relatively low.

[GalenEvil]

Okay, something else to think about then Since you know the locations and AABBs of the ships you can take the location and the distance to the farthest corner of the AABB and use that as a radius. Calculate a distance from projectile to the ship, for each ship, and only check against the AABB if the distance is less than the calculated radius. This should reduce overhead by a small amount since the radius should be precomputed, and you would be checking against a single value instead of the boundaries of the AABB. Another micro optimization to go with this is to use the square of the distance (x^2 + y^2) instead of the actual distance (sqrt(x^2 + y^2)) and compare it to the squared radius. Finding a square root is pretty slow compared to multiplications and every little bit helps as you are doing so many checks each frame.

The Quadtree probably is a little overkill for this heh