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[Draco18s]

This is great. It's kinda worked fine so far. When can we look forward to getting the custom ships into battle though?

It's high on the list, but also a roadblock as I have to figure out how to work in the simulator without making it bog things down.  I'll be working on it in and around trying to coordinate a few people writing an AI script (AI is a weak point of mine).

I'm going to show this thread to a few friends as well, if that's okay.

Go for it!

[Draco18s]

New version up.  Designed units are now usable in combat.

Now, thoughts about turrets:
One thought I had was to have separate structures that you'd build from the Construct menu placing them down.  They'd be based on the unit types, but be immobile and have extra range and/or hit points.

But a friend of mine came up with another idea, borrowing from Homeworld 2, which is that "turrets" are ships that will only listen to a single move order, and once there, never be movable again (they'd also be cheaper, have greater range and/or hit points--I'm considering having several built at once, the group costing 1 crystal, but I dislike that solution due to what happens when they die: either it's a 25% chance to drop a crystal, or none of them do, as I can't have them each drop a partial crystal, just due to how the harvesters are coded: they won't start harvesting a crystal unless they can both carry a full crystal AND there's a full crystal to harvest.  Or they cost no crystal to make).

Another thought is that buildings themselves have guns--like AI War's guard posts.  Or the Spire Cities.  I dislike this solution conceptually.

Yet Another Thought is to have "turret hubs" which use 1 crystal (for power) and then can support 4-8 turrets that would need to be built within a certain radius (I've got several games in mind that this might be comparable to, such as Perimeter or Space Game Missions).  This solution seems most workable, yet the least satisfying.

[Mephansteras]

Been playing around with the latest version. It's starting to turn into a functional game!

[Draco18s]

Been playing around with the latest version. It's starting to turn into a functional game!

Indeed!

[Fayrik]

Awesome, new version runs like a charm.

Yet Another Thought is to have "turret hubs" which use 1 crystal (for power) and then can support 4-8 turrets that would need to be built within a certain radius (I've got several games in mind that this might be comparable to, such as Perimeter or Space Game Missions).  This solution seems most workable, yet the least satisfying.

How can you say this is the least satisfying? I think having turret hubs is a fantastic idea. That way, you don't need to spend an extortionate amount of crystals on simple defences.

[Draco18s]

Oh, sure, it's a low-crystal solution, but all of them are intended to be (under 100% ideal conditions) to be low-crystal.

Its just that you end up with turret nests when they really aren't needed as nests.

[Fayrik]

Well, I also liked the idea of the nests. Like, if you just had standard turrets, to upgrade it's firepower, you'd have to more turrets around it, but with a nest, you can add more fire-power when you need to.
This then opens up the possibility of having turrets that you can deassign from nests, then place elsewhere. In other words, you can selectively strengthen your defensive lines in certain areas, without any extra cost.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

*Sigh* I go away for just a little bit and I manage to
lose all track of this. You have truly improved upon it
since the last time I came this way.

Also a bug to report. If you hold the left mouse button
as if you where going to drag select and then click the
right button the drag select box wont go away even if
you make another, it just has two boxes.

[Draco18s]

Also a bug to report. If you hold the left mouse button
as if you where going to drag select and then click the
right button the drag select box wont go away even if
you make another, it just has two boxes.

Nice catch breaking that.  The selection box isn't a terribly robust system (its mostly for display) and as it waits for a mouse_up event to remove itself, the right click makes the stage loose focus and the mouse_up never occurs.

I'll see if I can fix this.

[Draco18s]

Very slight update.

Working on new crystal-asteroids, and I think I like the result.  It's a slight bit slower (go go alpha multiplication) but should achieve the desired look.



(And of course, now that I have the image outside GIMP, I see that it's got an ugly border.  Darn)

[Draco18s]

Minor update:

I've got a few people trying to write an AI so that the game has an opponent.  There are four people independently doing their own thing, but at the same time it makes my job a little more difficult, as I can't fiddle around with things too much.  One of them is trying to optimize things some and make an interface so that the AI class can be better swapped out.  I'd like that to come back before I make any more sweeping changes.

Got some proto-turrets in, they're not fully finished, all I've done so far is make a way to spawn them (but besides ignoring player orders, they act and look like other ships).

Got to work out how to do player placement of buildings, as a UI thing, before I go too much farther.

[Mephansteras]

Sounds interesting. I'm curious to know what sort of AI strategies they're using.

[Draco18s]

Sounds interesting. I'm curious to know what sort of AI strategies they're using.

Me too!

Notably, they still only have ships to work with so far.  And my failturrets.<sup>1

1</sup>The turrets!  They kite!

[Korbac]

WHOAH. SERIOUS AWESOME, DRACO!!!

This is le awesome!!! All we need now is the buildings, and we have a game!

(An ability to get rid of designs would be good too, but that's not that important)

[Draco18s]

WHOAH. SERIOUS AWESOME, DRACO!!!

This is le awesome!!! All we need now is the buildings, and we have a game!

(An ability to get rid of designs would be good too, but that's not that important)

I should build in some kind of limitation to the designs, but I'm not too worried about it right now.  I'm considering saving out unit strong/weak information between games, such that if the player consistently likes to build a certain type of ship the AI has a close starting point to look at for a counter (saving CPU).  Not sure on that, though.