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[Armok]

looks great, although you might want lower saturation on most stars.

[Draco18s]

looks great, although you might want lower saturation on most stars.

It's already really low.  I actually can't desaturate them a whole lot more without it both losing its color variance (all the stars become red instead of some red, some blue) and contrast (the stars do not appear to be red).

I also did a second pass and added additional pure white stars (all 1 pixel in size).

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I think that it looks fine.

[Mephansteras]

Looks good to me!

[The Doctor]

I haven't read the whole thread since it's... technical, so this might have been in here.

Gravity wells. Is that possible to implement at all? I'd be fun to have a match, negotiating around a planet or star always tryin to suck you into an orbit you don't want, or even a black hole just straight-up sucking you in.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   It may be possible but because to move units all
you do is click where you want to go it would quickly
lose any novelty it may have. If there was a way to
plot your ships course and the well was an area that
lowered speed then maybe some tactics could be
derived from it but overall it would not add as much
as it subtracts from the game at this point. Or at least
that is what I think.

[Draco18s]

Yeah, not really an option.  It'd also be hell on the guys I have coding the AI.  I specifically went for a space-theme because you can go "Pathing?  Pfft, who needs pathing IN SPACE?"

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Yah, the ability to just go from point A to point B
in a straight line simplifies things so much its not even
funny.

[The Doctor]

Well I'd still like planets...

I was thinking, instead of making them obstacles, how about as resources? Like, a planet out-of-battlefield warps in resources to a certain area of the map, a warp-gate or something. The planet has a certain side who they make the resources for, so if that side controls it they get more than others would (supplies for a certain species, that kind of thing), but other players can still get something out of it?

Kind of like a super-asteroid, from what I understood about them, I guess. Most of what I just wrote is backstory, to make the basic gameplay idea plausible as I wrote it.

[Draco18s]

Certainly possible.

[Draco18s]

Oh hell yeah.  Nearing in on backgrounds.


Took 3707 ms to generate that image.  Larger will be slower.  Roughly speaking, an image the size of the background in use now would take 87.6 seconds to draw.

There are some optimizations I can make to the perlin noise function I'm using to generate the colors (the built-in function is of poor quality, not returning any results greater than 174, or so, meaning all of its noise is of low contrast), but it won't save a whole lot as I have to use three of them (the package only generates 1 channel).  Tops the speed can be improved by a factor of 3.  If I can get that, and then generate a half-size image and just draw it bigger, then the generation time should come down to about 7.3 seconds.

[Sensei]

I think you should add in a few nebulae. Should be simple to do and would really help it look interesting without needing to be cluttered. Use boolean curves.

[Draco18s]

I think you should add in a few nebulae. Should be simple to do and would really help it look interesting without needing to be cluttered. Use boolean curves.

I'm working on it.  I haven't figured out how to generate the right textures to it yet.  I should be able to do it with perlin noise, if I tweak it right.  I just haven't put any math to it yet.

[Sensei]

I was thinking, shouldn't need to use perlin noise for nebulae. Generate a curvy line (loops ok), and do something with gradients along that path. Then give it a bright color and a low-moderate opacity.

[Draco18s]

Generating a "loop" with code is tricky.  Especially if you don't want the edge to cross itself.

My initial plan is to generate one channel of perlin noise, threshold it (so it's black and white, but one channel), bucket-fill at a random location on another channel, filling like colors (so if I gen the noise on red, I fill with blue in either a single contiguous area of black or of red), then make that fill the alpha channel.  Then using the same seed generate perlin noise tweaked to have this pattern.  It will give me a ringed fill with outward facing gradiants, giving each a slightly higher transparency value.