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[chaosavy]

hmm.. I'll disable destroying gates since that interaction is a bit off.

Saving should work, I just tested it, there's also autosave which saves every 60 seconds (due to the crashes its really useful). 

What operating system do you have? Maybe its a permission thing.

thanks for feedback

[chaosavy]

Hey guys, project still going strong, here's some news: did an interview with True PC Gaming about the process, it also has some new screen shots of the new art style we are going for.

Direct link to interview:
http://truepcgaming.com/2012/01/11/when-a-hobby-becomes-an-obsession-void-destroyer-interview/
http://truepcgaming.com/

[Anvilfolk]

Really enjoyed reading that! And definitely looking forward to Void Destroyer!

[chaosavy]

Updated first post with Iteration 11 news, here's what it says:

Bit longer than a year ago I posted the first message here, the time has brought many updates and changes to the project:

Void Destroyer - Iteration 11 is now avaiable.

At least one of you guys' suggestions made it into the project (more RTS like camera for tactical mode - eg: move mouse to the right and have camera side step to the right, etc). Also by popular demand I replaced the font

Here's my favorite screen shot of the newest batch:


There's more on the Media page here:
http://voiddestroyer.com/media.html

Which includes a YouTube vid I put together demoing this release:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dwVr444Ebw

The project is still free (now in Alpha stage), the download page is here:
http://voiddestroyer.com/download.html

As you can see the project has had significant updates to the graphics and effects. The change log is here:
http://voiddestroyer.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=363


Hope you check it out and let me know what you think! thanks

[Orb]

Very cool. Interestingly enough, I had recently deleted this game off of my computer, writing it off as a dead project. Glad I was wrong! 

[chaosavy]

hah! Glad to have you back.

The project is/was under continual development, in the past iterations were released on a monthly basis, but what happened was that coding exceeded the art, so for example turrets gained the ability to pivot (they only used to rotate, and their barrels (etc) would only face a static direction) but there were no turrets that were finished/textured art. And there wasn't a new feature like in the other iterations, just overall additions and enhancements (torps, energy missiles, new way of displaying projectiles, directional thrusters, asteroids, pivoting turrets, multi barrelled weapons, AI was re-written, camera was re-written, etc etc). Then the art direction took a complete overhaul with a great artist coming onboard, and we both didn't want to release another iter till most of the art was the new art style so that it wouldn't clash so much (remember the single colored ships?).

The good part about a wider release cycle was that releasing an iteration takes about 2 or so weeks out of the schedule for bug testing, polishing up, cleaning up, and marketing (eg: screen shots and videos - that 3 min vid took 4 hours for me to make heh). So by doing less smaller releases and one big one it actually helped speed up development.

It also was a sort of an arms race with me and the artist, he'd create some awesome looking ship/station/art, I'd code stuff to add the features of it in. Lots of fun.

[ductape]

this looks awesome, really love the art style, i think I will check this out.

[ukulele]

Looks great so far, ill have to download it and give it a try, keep up the great work!

[Girlinhat]

If those screenshots are anything to tell off, then you're producing things better than I've seen professional companies make.  The RTS styling looks fun, though I haven't seen how it actually plays yet.  I'm downloading the most recent iteration now, and my shitty 150kb/s internet doesn't like to download while also downloading video, so I'll just skip the media and jump right into gameplay.

Still, if this plays half as good as it looks like it should, then I must only make one request: Artillery.  Big, long, LONG range guns.  Not the crappy "archers fire from five feet away" ranged combat that too many games encourage.  This is space, ships are firing across thousands of kilometers!  I'd love to see even a fraction of that, with long range guns able to throw damage at ranges further than most ship sensors will reach.  It's been too long since I've found a good game that can give that resounding arc through the sky and satisfying thud that true artillery should encourage.

If you've already got this, then disregard it and take all my monies.

[chaosavy]

thanks for giving it a shot guys!

ukulele: thanks for the encouragement!

ductape: the art style achieves many things. It is reletively unique (Borderlandesque?) - space sim wise it is totaly unique. Because it isn't "photorealistic" or what have you it isn't competing with X3 and other games whose art quality would unfortunatly dwarf us - if we tried to compete we'd only end up being a cheaper version of whoever we tried to compete with. Being indie with no budget etc, we've decided on side stepping the competition and competing on terms that are we are strong on. Basically we have nothing to lose so we can risk it all. That's our strenght that makes our weakness irrelevant. In this case trying something different. The other benefit of the art style is that the textures are very re-usable (they can literally scale 100 times over and still look good, that's impossible for photo realistic style as far as I know) meaning that development is greatly speed up - new ships/stations/etc are the life of this project they keep us motivated and the game needs content badly.

Girlinhat:  that's funny that you mention long ranges, the first reason is because the game is fully moddable, you can have those huge ranges if you want, in the game's Data\Weapons\Ammo folder you can find all the projectile xml files, all you'd have to do is tweak one of these values:

<projectileVelocity attr1="400.0"/>
<initialLife attr1="1.0"/>

if you say initial life is 2.0 then the range is now 800 (rate * time = distance - in game units which haven't been decided yet). Yep its that easy to mod. The AI will then re-calculate its tactics and maneuvers.  You can change the firing rate, ammo, damage, down to the visual, you could have invisible bullets, visual ones, glowy ones, bullets that look like artillery shells. We are constantly on the look out for adding newer and more interesting weapons, just today we talked about proximity torpedos and shrapnel flak guns.

The 2nd reason why this is funny is because the artist overhauled the characteristic of ships and weapons multiplying a lot of the values that I've had (on indie projects we wear many hats heh heh). Basically giving the same reasons you've given. Ranges used to be 100 units for small fighter's guns, now they are 400 and go up from there on larger ships. I'll always insisit that when you fire on something you should see it and that when something is firing at you - you should see that as well. But that's only for the "vanilla" version, players/modders can change at will. I'll code in a system that will support total conversions, so modders will simply trade data folders that have the ship/stations/etc specs. The fairly easily readable xml files than contain model info, weapons, positions of them, speeds, healths, costs etc.

Even if you don't want to do a total conversion you could mod the game and then use the battle editor (in game map creation - point and click etc) to stage mini war games with your tweaked ships.

[Girlinhat]

The best artillery I've seen implemented is probably Supreme Commander (the first one).  It's a massive range indirect fire bombardment.  You could set it to target anything you wanted, but that didn't guarantee a hit.  In fact firing at troops with large artillery was all but impossible, as they'd just move out of range.  Some of the larger enemy experimentals could be artied if you were good at it.  Most times it was used against structures, with good reason.  A single shot could destroy buildings, but if it didn't destroy them then the massive reload time allowed plenty of time to repair, and enemy shields were prone to withstanding artillery rather easily - until you build a lot of artillery that is.  It was just satisfying, watching the oversized barrel swing around and the bass thud of the shell leaving, arcing across the map and taking several seconds before it crashes into the ground.  Sometimes hitting, most times leaving a bit warning crater and some scared enemies.

In Void terms, you could mount an oversized railgun ship or mass driver - mass drivers are usually the bigger ones - or otherwise large weapon capable of firing outside its sensor range.  It would usually need spotters to find targets for it to shoot, and would only do so with limited use.  Like, I would suspect that an enemy base has enough defenses to withstand a bombardment, while enemy ships would more likely evade it.  This would limit the artillery to shooting at platforms, capital ships, and lucky shots on stationary ships.  A lower accuracy and a "misfire" chance would help, a somewhat uncommon chance for the projectile to glance or imbed against the enemy, dealing significantly less damage.  But, the biggest thing would be a limit to range.  No firing from one base to another, it would still need to move closer.

Aaaanyways, played around some, and I gotta say that I absolutely love it, except for the apparent lack of content.  Which is a good thing.  It means the biggest issue with your game is that there's not enough of it.  The bits I do gripe about though, are mainly interface.  Actually, mainly mouse interface.  First the sensitivity appears terribly low, and when I move my mouse it's WAY slower than when I'm on normal desktop, which is irritating because a lot of the buttons are on opposite sides of the screen.  Second is that the mousewheel is used a lot.  I use a trackball, and I have no mousewheel, but I do have two extra buttons on the mouse that I usually keybind into mousewheel functions.  I assume there's set of options I can access via text editor but I haven't looked that closely.  Third is that the right-mouse-drag to rotate is extremely crazy.  It's VERY fast and it's partly inverted and partly not.  I can't rotate without thinking about it a whole lot.

As for the actual game, it runs great, if a little of a clunky interface at some points.  Issuing commands could be made easier, though I found my ships doing their own thing without me rather well.  The tutorial was also misdone in one point, it's not < and > it's actually , and . and that took a moment for me to fuddle with.  The "t" to target an enemy should also auto-target another enemy.  When I've killed my target and there's 5 others shooting at me, it should automatically target the closest enemy ship until there are no enemies left, and then leave it without a target.  I also didn't see a way to harvest resources, so I spent my ore on the command ship and then couldn't build a shipyard, but I didn't actually stick around long enough to see if I could harvest more ore somehow.

The only big request I'd have to make is custom ships.  You've already got different weapon templates for the same ships, like one version that fires gattling guns and another of the same type that fires missiles.  If you could make a class that used the components you wanted, that would broaden research options quite a bit and allow for tailor-made ships to face a specific enemy type.  Seems it would be rather easy to let the player pick weapons and equipment to mount onto an existing hull.

Overall though, fantastic.  I'm utterly impressed by the quality and the shine put on the game.  The "sliding" fighter physics are a joy and the auto-tracking turrets makes combat easier and lets me focus more on maneuvering than forcing me to pay attention on where my turrets are facing.  Which really captures space combat, you'd see very very few warships with fixed mounted weapons, and you'd see most ships taking advantage of the inertia and sliding as they fight.  Ships don't fight like jets, and for that I am thankful.  You've also captured a very satisfying shooting style, in an odd way.  It feels very good to fire off and see the enemy pop, flame, and explode.

[Mephansteras]

Posting to watch

[chaosavy]

wow awesome feedback Girlinhat, thanks


Keybinding and mouse sensitivity - this doesn't exist yet, its been on the schedule (to add) for forever and will ofcourse happen. Its interesting that you use a track ball - I'll definatly have to add zoom in zoom out functions for buttons and keys.

Auto targeting - I'll think about this one, worst case scenario I'll add it as an option.

Harvesting: asteroid bases actually do this automatically. What happens is that every few seconds you gain/lose resources. Gain due to production and lose due to consumption - feeding your crew or upkeeping stations you've built. The economy management is handled via the "Base" button in Tactical mode (when you click an asteroid base you own you get this button to appear in the lower portion of the main tactical screen). Then you have a bunch of sliders that will impact what percentage of your crew does what - eg: focus on ore, or energy. There's also a "competative advantage" deal where if more than 45% of your crew work on one particular field you get a hefty bonus to that production. The thing is that its difficult to explain this via tutorials - which are based off of events like key presses, objects build, objects destroyed. There is also a trading component that was disabled for iter 11 (disabled by not including a trading ship) - didn't have a model for it plus there aren't that many bases to trade with - basically you can ferry cargo between your bases, so one could focus on ore, and another on energy. The bases themselves have different potentials/outputs for a resource.

So essencially harvesting is automatic, but there is going to be an additional game mechanic of harvesting through mining asteroids. One way will be by shooting a roid, having a baby roid pop up and then scooping that roid up and delivering it to the transfer platform. This will also be fairly automated but the player will have to keep an eye on this due to pirates and other attacks to your mining ships. There may also be mining platforms that spit out cargo pods of ore, and stuff like that. Things like this will add life to the game, now that there's some mining going on here, and pirate attacks there.

Like you said there is a lack of content, I've had about a 2 years head start of programming on the artwork so as that comes along it will flow into the game and enhance it with more stuff to do. My gues we are about 8 months away from beta/release. At a hopefuly fairly soon point (soon being months away) we'll be adding content quite fast, right now the focus is still on the overall engine and gameplay.

Artillery: the plan has been for one of the platforms to be built to be an offensive railgun/mass driver type deal. Just like the defense stations but with one huge gun that can target other far away bases and objects. This will serve a few purpouses - pretty awesome thing discourages player from turtling - have to knock that platform out else keep getting hit - though not having enough forces to invade have to destroy the threat of artillery right now. Have another way to damage a base's population - versus the reletively boring marine ships. Bases will have "habitat" platforms to expand their crew that will be much more vulnerable to attacks since they are outside the base - so via teh artillery platform you can soften up crew and defenses.  Plus now placing your platforms is a tactical decision due to making them vulnerable to attack if placed on a side that faces the artillery platform. Its an example of adding a single thing makes the game much more complex, and as a bonus adding a platform like this is fairly easy - code already  mostly exists

Having a mobile version of that is a pretty cool idea, a spotter is a pretty cool idea too, but maybe too complex for the "final release" maybe in part 2 or an update etc.

Ship dynamics and physics: yeah this was always the dream and I'm glad I'm on the right path. Space should feel like space and not like a first person shooter or jet. The dynamics can both help (turning off auto thrust and facing target to fire on it while moving away) and hurt (having to compensate for the momentum). Recently we've added the afterburner and it was a huge game changer to the fun. Makes the flight have more options which adds to the tactics and thinking and allows to compensate for the momentum.

Explosions and combat: wait till we add in debris You'll see parts  of your victories/defeats floating around Also code already exists for "pre-explosions" they just haven't been added in yet, so you'll see the burning, then small explosions, then the big explosion then debris when its all said and done. Luckily debris are mostly chopping up old models and using re-usable parts so that's another way we can easily add to the experience.


Customizations: the command ship most likely will get a customization screen where you can pick and chose which turrets to mount/use, so this will most likely leech into other ships - but will mostly affect large ones. Potential for part 2 or post release though.

[Girlinhat]

I'd take a page from Homeworld 2 there.  Battleships can mount like 4 modules, carriers can mount 2, and the fighters and frigates are mainly stock versions.  This lets you mass-produce the simple units but customize your larger ones a bit, depending on if your battleship is going to be lasing down bases with ion beams, or if it's going to be watching the battlefield with a massive active sensor.

I think you need a new section of the site, where you basically throw out all the things you want to include.  Toady has the dev page that lists super-longterm goals, and I think you need something like that.  You talking about habitat modules and stuff got me interested.  A section of website dedicated to "These are some cool ideas I thought about" can generate a surprising amount of hype.

[Areyar]

This is looking sweet!

As an old-time Oolite modding amateur (A_H), I was going to ask whether it was moddable, but you just answered that several posts up in the affirmative.
So I'll ask another questions: How deep does this 'everything' go? What things remain hard-coded, or initially shielded off, from meddlers?
Do you have a framework set up (or plan to) to allow mods to be shared and be compatible with each other? I loved how OXPs are cumulative.