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[Orb]

Hm, I don't think you understood what I meant. While I see how you wanted the keys to match ship mode, there's still no keys that do what I'm thinking, if that makes any sense at all. So mapping keys wouldn't work.


Basically, if you look at it from a top-down perspective, a moves the screen <----, d moves the screen ---->. But, there's no key to move it forward or backward. Like...uh. I'll make a picture. Explaining ideas through words alone is difficult.

Actually, I made two.

Spoiler: Camera Controls (click to show/hide)

[chaosavy]

webadict: I fought with that bug for a while   will win, but I spent over a day on it without any results so I let it go for now (cropped up when I put in actual physics forces, something to do with rounding and the time step that the physics engine gets, it is slightly different from the time step that the rendering engine gets)



Orb: I think I get it: what you want is a Warcraft and other RTS type camera (sort of isometric/top down). Where the movement keys are not as tied to the orientation of the camera (as they are now). Sort of an assumption that there is a sort of a virtual ground plane and that north isn't UP but sort of away from the equator. Hmm... this would make the move command and placing stations easier/more accurate. I'll make a note to put in a toggle of some sort to do this (EG: like F1 F2 in ship mode). Akura also mentioned that it using the mouse was hard to manage. SeaBee
 also echoed this. Will have to think on this a lot. thanks everyone! this is something I wouldn't have thought of.


My current timeline is like so:

Add in "research system" to control player progression and be able to nail down enemy progression more (EG: you start with corvette type ships, you have to research a frigate type ship, or capture an enemy frigate or destroy X number of enemy frigates or a combination of all 3 to get the ability to build frigates). At first you are attacked by fighters, corvettes and frigates, no destroyers yet, till you get frigates, etc.

Add in instant action mode: scenario type mode with predefined scenarios (for huge instant action battles) and ability for players to create/export their own. Most likely: unlock ships to fly as you go through story (EG: destroy 10 enemy corvettes, its unlocked, research destroyer its unlocked)

At that point it will be alpha stage.

During alpha:
refine everything (GUI, tutorials, add little touches like icons, create cool hud)
add stations (city station, assault station [attacks bases and other stations], gate station/fast transport station) Add ships and ship models
Work on game world (more asteroids, more bases, pirate base/station)
Add stoyline elements (objectives, and potentially in game cut scenes)
More tactical mode refinements/options: grouping ships, formations, feedback
Better AI and actual pathfinding
FX: sounds, better explosions (chunks flying)
Finalize modding tools

[Dariush]

I couldn't pass the fourth tutorial - after placing trading scaffold and pressing 'build' nothing happened.

[chaosavy]

Dariush: hmm.. I'll have to check into that, it should give you feedback on what is going on - eg: if the line that connects the scafford to the base is red that means that the station would be too close to the base. If the scaffold is red that means that there is another object colliding with it. If both are green you should be able to build if you have enough resources (which gets checked prior to placing the scaffold and right before the build).

[Dariush]

Uh... yeah, the line was red. But it didn't say anything about being too close to the base. Actually I thought that it was too far. It would be nice if you told that in tutorial or after pressing the 'build' button

[chaosavy]

The tutorial should mention that red means blab blab stuff. Either way you are right I have to add more feedback to the process, thanks. Some people may skip the tutorial all together so like you say the feedback should be outside on that lil gui by the build button.

[chaosavy]

I figured out the cause of the [ crash, turns out that I didn't include the sun and the station around it in the lists that are generated when the [ or ] keys are pressed. So you guys happened to click on those objects then pressed [ or ] and the game crashed.

Also I think I got the "clicking on the focus" gui crash fixed as well. I was able to replicate it, and after putting in some code fixes it doesn't appear to crash anymore.

The weird "Press the Press the [ key." bug still eludes me, it has to do with the "[" character, it triggers the duplication, very odd.

There's a new executable to download on the main site as well as a new installer for new users.

thanks again

[Diakron]

I may have missed it, I often do, but do you have Tech. spec. for the game? I'd like to play it (big fan of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, an awesome game that's worth a play through) and can get ahold of a decent connection but my gaming rig fried its 1TB HD so I'm stuck with old PC...

[Akura]

Akura: my joystick (very old Saitek "Cyborg 3d Gold USB) )works fine, what are you using? Very odd. I may have to buy a bunch of joysticks and see how they behave. Maybe solution is to add "reverse such and such axis" toggle on joysticks. Will have to add.

Saitek X36. Haven't had any problems with it before, except maybe with the Battlecruiser games.

[chaosavy]

Diakron: I started developing the game on what on a pc that would have been upper middle of the line 3 years ago. Game ran well. So give it a shot and let me know how it goes. If you don't have a Nvidia or ATI graphics card you can change the visual options to use "Bare Bones" mode which is textureless and shader less. You'll basically see ships colored by their faction, but otherwise can still play the game.

There's not a lot of "requirements" since I don't exactly know what they are Before release I'll have to draw something up, but now things are much less informal.

[Talfryn]

Two things I noticed Chaosavy right away. One, the text in it's current iteration is still really hard to read. C's look like O's, so combat comes out oombat, which looks a bit ridiculous. I'd suggest bigger text and a font that has more spacing between parts of letters.

Two, although this is probably intentional, there is no drag in space. Modeling the game with drag the way it is now takes something away I think, and will certainly make a lot of people twitch.

[chaosavy]

Talfryn: noted on the font.  I'll spend some time on teh font for the next iter.


The game doesn't have any drag   One of my primary goals was that there is no drag.

What you may be noticing is that the ship itself corrects the velocity if Smart Thrust (I have to come up with a better name for this since this is sort of lame) is enabled. If Smart Thrust is enabled the ship will try to reach the speed setting.  This is fairly necessary to have a good fun experience and makes sense that the space ship would auto correct.

Example: ship is moving forward at 5 velocity. The ship turns, its now sliding in whatever direction that was its forward before the turn until the engines compensate and the ship is moving forward again.

To see this you can turn smart thrust off (F key in ship mode or click the gui) (its often a good combat tactic) and you'll see that there is no drag I tend to turn it off when doing attack runs, that way I'm sure I won't collide with the ship I'm aiming at and can stil aim at it to shoot it

thanks for giving it a shot!

[Hitty40]

Played this game a bit, I'm already hooked, although I do have 3 questions.

Do the gates have any use right now? All I'm getting when I go into my Command Ships' Crew Crontrol is to attack it.

Are there any other ships to unlock this iter?

Will there be multiplayer?

[chaosavy]

Thanks for giving it a shot and letting me know you like it! I appreciate it, keeps me motivated!

The gate is very basic (as in very low on where it is intended to be code/game wise), previously the player was able to destroy it to stop the enemy ships from coming in. Now I think its somewhat indestructible (because AI will shoot at its center thus missing it) you could manually shoot at it yourself, but that'd probably take a very long time.

The goal is for the player to eventually take the fight to the Outsiders via the gate. The gate will then become indestructible (kind of like the asteroid bases are), but maybe the player will be able to damage it to slow down the flood of ships. This should be part of the stoyrline, however if I can't do this well (eg: writing, story telling, etc) then I may have to scrap the storyline (though I'm really hoping I won't have to). Also most likely the player will be able to build "gate stations" that will speed up travel between the bases. I always had a idea that from the large gate smaller gates would appear and from those smaller gates a flood of fighters etc, player has to destroy otherwise be overwhelmed by the lil guys.


Unlockable ships: for the most part the ones you see are the ones that are in game. The Outsiders have more ships that I removed (corvette, destroyer and carrier - placeholder models) from this iter due to wanting to control the difficulty more to allow the player to take over the enemy base.  If you take over the enemy base you can build their ships (the corvette and frigate) or you can launch their fighter from their base. The other enemy base will also launch its ships against you eventually, which also includes a carrier (placeholder model). You could also upgrade the Command Ship with the "Command" ability, level it up some and then take over enemy ships to fly them or order them around.

The plan is for each faction to have a fighter, corvette, frigate, destroyer, carrier, cruiser and dreadnaught. One of each for the most part. There may be special ships and/or "bosses" etc. The plan is to make the fighter/corvette ships more distinct from the larger ships, not just by how fast they turn/move etc, but to hopefuly give a better feel for smaller versus larger ships (whatever that ends up meaning, haven't figured it all out yet).


Multiplayer: most likely not in this project, but maybe in future projects depending on demand/success/etc. From what I understand multiplayer is something that should be built into the game from the ground up, plus I know nothing of it (although this never stopped me before, I knew nothing of anything at the start). I'd love to have multiplayer, but I have to pick and chose, and my larger interest is single player.

[Hitty40]

Ok, wanna give some feedback. Decided to take my CS and some fighters out to the Outsider Gate, destroyed it, all Hell broke loose since the game crashed on me. It also appear games aren't saving, as I had saved a game earlier and it is not showing up.