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[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   So far it looks good. Just one thing though, turret hubs
should probably have a part of the cost required up front
as right now its to easy to use them to bait the enemy
ships around because they get destroyed quick enough not
to hardly cost anything.

[Draco18s]

   So far it looks good. Just one thing though, turret hubs
should probably have a part of the cost required up front
as right now its to easy to use them to bait the enemy
ships around because they get destroyed quick enough not
to hardly cost anything.

Good point.

* Draco18s checks code

Uh.  You are spending a crystal every time you do that.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Huh, I did not notice the crystal use...

Edit: I think I know why I did not notice it.
I was using turret spam as my method of
choice. Crystals tend to pile up if you are
not actively building ships. I would like to
adjust my suggestion. Instead of having a
higher start up cost make it so you can't
just troll the enemy base with turret. Just
one turret nest can take a number of ships
and you can build them anywhere.

[Draco18s]

Huh, I did not notice the crystal use...

Just
one turret nest can take a number of ships
and you can build them anywhere.

Yeah, I'm trying to work out what the reasonable limit on placing turrets should be.  You shouldn't be able to place a turret hub "just anywhere" it'd have to be connected into your "power network" at it were¹, I just haven't worked out what that network is, how it is extended, and such.

¹See: Perimeter, Creeper World, and The Space Game: Missions

[Aklyon]

Creeper World 1, or 2?

[Draco18s]

Creeper World 1, or 2?

Either one; the only one I've played is Creeper World Training Sim, or something like that.  It's on Kongregate.

The point was: there's a power network in all three of them.

[Aklyon]

I was asking because Creeper World 2 uses a wireless network, so its almost nothing like Training Sim.

I get your point about the power network, though, and another game to that list: Harvest Massive Encounter.

[Draco18s]

I don't mind if the network is wired or wireless, just that it has to have a limited range.

The question is:
Do I want building nodes (that are attackable) that transmit power?  What's the range from the mother ship?

Etc.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   What about using the turret hub and turrets
themselves? You already have turrets needing to
be close to a hub so make the hubs have to be
a certain distance from other hubs or the home
base. Give the base a decent sized range in which
hubs can be built.
   Another idea that builds on the last is you could
make it so that the hubs range goes farther the
less turrets are connected to it. This would put the
tactical problem of having well defended hubs that
have to be close to each other or a undefended hub
system that stretches farther and uses less resources.

[Draco18s]

   What about using the turret hub and turrets
themselves? You already have turrets needing to
be close to a hub so make the hubs have to be
a certain distance from other hubs or the home
base. Give the base a decent sized range in which
hubs can be built.

I'd considered it.

   Another idea that builds on the last is you could
make it so that the hubs range goes farther the
less turrets are connected to it. This would put the
tactical problem of having well defended hubs that
have to be close to each other or a undefended hub
system that stretches farther and uses less resources.

That's certainly an idea.

[Draco18s]

Started poking around with making the hubs need supply and such, but ran into an issue of when the supply chain is interrupted.  I had the clever idea of each hub taking up a "turret slot" in order to keep track of a hub supplying another hub.

But then I hit a snag with regards to losing connections and having the power network find alternative links.  The node graph I had was mono-directional!  And without care, it was possible to end up with two (or more) nodes that were supplying each other, and if the original parent connection was lost, continue to supply each other.

Will re-approach this again at another time.

[Virex]

Started poking around with making the hubs need supply and such, but ran into an issue of when the supply chain is interrupted.  I had the clever idea of each hub taking up a "turret slot" in order to keep track of a hub supplying another hub.

But then I hit a snag with regards to losing connections and having the power network find alternative links.  The node graph I had was mono-directional!  And without care, it was possible to end up with two (or more) nodes that were supplying each other, and if the original parent connection was lost, continue to supply each other.

Will re-approach this again at another time.

You need a graph walking algorithm for that. Consider the following pseudocode:

Code: [Select]

GraphWalker(connection)
  If hub.visited = false
     hub.visited = true
     Loop for each connectedHub in hub.connectedHubs do
       GraphWalker(connectedHub)If you call this function on all possible connections from the mothership it will walk through the hub graph and check if there is a connection from the mothership to each hub. It doesn't find the shortest path, but it will always find a path if one exists. This means that all hubs that aren't marked as visited are disconnected from the grid and thus unpowerd. By running the algorithm every time something changes you can keep the hub connectivity graph up to date and immediately tell if something has been disconnected.


If you'd actually want to find the shortest path, you'd have to implement a variation on this algorithm called Dijkstra's Algorithm, which is guaranteed to find the shortest-path-tree representing the shortest path from the mothership to each hub.

[Draco18s]

You need a graph walking algorithm for that. Consider the following pseudocode:

Code: [Select]

GraphWalker(connection)
  If hub.visited = false
     hub.visited = true
     Loop for each connectedHub in hub.connectedHubs do
       GraphWalker(connectedHub)

Yep.  I knew I needed something like it.  It was just too late at night to want to think about it.

[Draco18s]

You need a graph walking algorithm for that. Consider the following pseudocode:

Code: [Select]

GraphWalker(connection)
  If hub.visited = false
     hub.visited = true
     Loop for each connectedHub in hub.connectedHubs do
       GraphWalker(connectedHub)

Yep.  I knew I needed something like it.  It was just too late at night to want to think about it.

I figured out a different way to do it this morning that doesn't require knowing the whole network.  Instead each node knows all of its child nodes, and when it loses supply it first checks to see if it can get supply back from another hub (using the main hub list), if not it sets all of its children to not having supply and clears its children list.

Turrets already had code to seek a new hub if they lost supply, so I borrowed that code and added it to hubs.

Took a couple hours to get it to work right (kept forgetting to do one thing or another, so my 2nd tier hubs weren't in the main hub list, etc.) but it works great.

I also put in the more turrets -> less supply range.  It only applies to hubs.  There's a base 3.2 multiplier on supply distance from another hub, and each turret on that hub reduces the multiplier by 0.2--so it starts at 192 pixels and drops down to 120.

I haven't tested anything complex yet, but it does appear to be working correctly.

[Draco18s]

Fiddled with the nebula generation today.

This one added render time (1000ms instead of 800ms per 10,000 pixels of cloud), but looks fantastic.


This one I used output from a perlin noise that had already been generated for another purpose, giving largely the same results.