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[webadict]

Perhaps I'll check this out tomorrow-ish. It looks kinda cool.

[Orb]

Very awesome game you have here.


Like any good player, I dived right in and skipped the tutorial. Its actually relatively easy to get the hang of. Well, the tactical screen anyway. I didn't mess around with flying ships yet.


From first glance, while I'm not sure if you can implement this, but being able to see weapons fire on the tactical map. Like watching a little dot going from ship A to ship B, for instance a missile. Or miss completely and go into the oblivion.

I should probably check the tutorial before saying anymore, but would it be possible to zoom to an object by middle mouse clicking it?

Finely, the game crashed when I rapidly hit the focus button. I was zoom in on an enemy asteroid base, then I set my capital ship's target from that to my home base, then clicked the focus button a few times. Mainly me just screwing around to figure out camera controls, but I thought it was worth noting.

[chaosavy]

thanks for checking it out guys! I really appreciate it.


Orb: That's a neat idea to show more feedback in tactical mode. I've been thinking about this for a while. Sort of on the edge about deciding exactly what to put in, your vote certainly adds to the equasion. I always wanted to distinguish Tactical mode from Ship mode (other wise what's the point?). So I made the decision not to initially put in weapons in tactical, however there needs to be some sort of a feedback when a fight is occuring.

Options:
showing bullets
changing the colors of the ships underattack (eg: flashing red etc)
having some sort of a circle spread out when ships were fighting it out (sort of a radar ping)

These are definatly possible, only issue (most likely small issue, though since this is my first time doing this I'm always paranoid about performance not having actual experience other than what I did so far) is that I basically duplicate objects in ship and tactical modes (since they have different textures) so adding more stuff means using more memory. From the player's perspective it is the same thing (same ship, same position, same thing happening) from the game's it is a seperate object in a seperate "scene manager".

Instead of clicking the Focus button you can press the F key which will do the same thing. Is this what you are refering too? Let me know if this is the equivalent and I'll consider adding the right mouse button zoom dealie I don't see much use for the middle mouse button in tactical mode so this could be a good fit

Argh! That damned crash, I'll have to dig more into it, thanks for letting me know that it still happens (I thought I fixed it just prior to releasing iter this version). Crash bugs make me so nervous since they are an obvious statement on the quality of the project. (Behind the scenes: I think this is because somehow the camera which should always be attached to something becomes an orphan and a crash occurs when it tries switches parents [having no parent means cash] when a focus happens).


thanks again!

[Sinned]

Wow, looks fun and promising.  I missed that previous post/thread it seems

Gonna take a look see, thanks for sharing chaosavy.

[etgfrog]

well...i was worried for a little bit that this was far too close to the game i was wanting to make, but thankfully it isn't, it does look like an interesting game ans shows some potential, just remember to try to keep things in the game fun.

[Rex_Nex]

Downloading now; will give some feedback soon!

[Audioworm333]

Wooh, this looks awesome. Downloading.

[Akura]

It's fun so far. A few things:

There should be an easier way to see what's going on. Using the mouse to look around in Tactical Mode is hard to manage. I would also like it if trying to center on an enemy unit from the unit list didn't cancel your current selection. Even better, if you could give orders to that target on the list simply by right-clicking on the list.

The flight AI seems fairly decent. During the tutorial battle after it tells you how to launch fighters, I noticed my ship pulling some crazy(good crazy) manuevers, but at times, it crashed into the target ship(no damage on either), and there were a couple of friendly-fire incidents(I did not check for damage) out there as well.


EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot. There was an issue with my joystick. The X and Y axis were flipped around or something.

[chaosavy]

Sinned: thanks! I try not to spam bay12forums.com with every update, but will post about this project every few months to catch people like yourself

etgfrog: tell me about your project? *gets a pad and pen ready* kidding around! actually even if someone set out to make the exact game I or someone else is making in the end it would end up different. During development projects tend to change, ideas show up (for some reason often when I'm brushing my teeth or washing dishes). There's evolution, there's bugs that end up features. etc. The huge time it takes for something to be made also means that things get constantly dropped, changed, evolved. But seriously I'm curious about other projects so share if you can

Rex_Nex and Audioworm333: thanks!

Akura: thanks! what is ackward about changing the view? can you think of ways to fix this? does some other game do it better? I tend to use both the right mouse button to turn and the W A S D Q E keys to strafe around to change the view. The zoom in/out speed I think needs to be increased.

Good idea about right clicking on list to set targets. Will do. Luckily this solves the issue below.

 "I would also like it if trying to center on an enemy unit from the unit list didn't cancel your current selection."

So as you noticed currently left click selects objects making them the "selected object", but if nothing is selected then the "selected object" is the ship that the player is controlling.

The selected object will get issued orders. However if the selected object is an also what you right clicked on - this will make the selected and right clicked object the player ship's target. Right click and hold also changes the view, and clears the target if right clicking on an empty spot. So there's a ton of stuff that these two buttons do based on context.

Luckily your idea of right clicking on the object list will not result in added complecity to the already complex shenanigans of the above.

Ship AI: the fighter ship AI (currently) has actually only 3 predefined maneuvers chosen at random. Two of them it turns off its thrust correction (aka Smart Thrust) meaning that it can change orientation without changing where it is going. So it can rotate to its target (thus line up for shots) while avoiding it. So usually it doesn't collide (especially with non-moving objects). Because during combat objects tend to move during a fighter to fighter combat you don't often notice the 3 very static maneuvers

Damage is turned off for collisions until I come up with a fair (non-insta blow up) outcome. Some sort of a formula which takes speed and mass of objects into account, does some reasonable damage but is fairly trivial (hate the auto explode of X3). Although truthfully having one of the objects blow up would make things so much simpler (one couldn't get stuck on the other), I don't want to go this route. The AI needs a ton of work on path finding and getting out of jams. What's neat if you watch in tactical mode is that the ships will bounce off one another (thanks to the physics engine) which I think is really cool (here's a you tube vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xk-Yu8QS88).

I'd love to add another meanuver where the AI fighter gets on the ship's rear and stays there. This may not be very practical with the "somewhat newtonian physics" 

Friendly fire causes damage (and actually happens very often). What never damages a ship is its own guns or missiles. Because for now I didn't teach the turrets a smart way of avoiding this (I may not bother with this, as there's so much more important things). I consider this something for the player to manage (positioning), what eventually should be seen is formations (ala Homeworld, but a bit more basic) which will hopefuly limit this and add another cool thing to the game.

[Orb]

Messing around in the tutorial. Could you possibly make it that while in tactical mode, w and s move the camera, north/south, like how a and d move it west/east. Right now they are used to zoom, which is accomplished by the mouse wheel.

"Edit" Forgot to mention, I like the music.

[SeaBee]

I've had a chance to play through the first three tutorial missions. Promising game so far!

I did have a little trouble with the third (Combat Basics) tutorial. Pressing "[" when ordered crashes the game. Repeatable. "Unhandled exception at 0x010bafd1 in VoidDestroyer.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000018." (Via Visual Studio's debugger.)

Clicking the LMB (presumably clearing my target) allowed it to work. I didn’t see anything else go wrong in the tutorial. Trying that tutorial multiple times was successful if I clicked the mouse once before pressing "[" -- it may be something specific to my machine.

The text for that tutorial message has a small typo: “Press the Press the [ key.”

The music and effects are very good. The models are interesting. The interface is manageable, but not super-fast for me to work with yet. The ability to pause and organize everything is great (thank you).

The mouse-flight controls are workable, but it felt a little unnatural to me. For instance, I had trouble making very gentle turns. The deadzone settings might be the reason for this (I left everything at default on purpose), but it felt like I'd either be going straight, turning kinda of slow, or turning fast. I was missing the "very slow" turn. Does that make sense? Naturally, that could be my fault since I didn't alter the settings, or it could be the way the ships in the game are meant to move.

I'd agree on using the WASD keys to navigate the tactical screen as North, South, West, East. Using W and A to zoom felt awkward (I always use the scroll wheel). My widescreen made things look a little odd when rotating around in that screen. I'm not sure if the aspect ratio was a bit off or if I was just crazy. I'll play around with it more later.

This is one of those games that I could very much enjoy once it's been polished up a little. I look forward to spending some more time with it and I'll share my thoughts as I do. Best of luck!

[webadict]

So, I played through the first tutorial and decided to mess around a bit. I beat the tutorial without too much problem.

First off, little c's and o's look almost exactly the same. It might be my display, but a bit more distinction would be nice.
Secondly, after the end of the tutorial, I was allowed to free play. Fun! Unfortunately, some message kept redisplaying at the end that had nothing in it. It was kind of annoying.
Third, and most importantly, I managed to crash the game. I'm not sure why, but it might be the same error SeaBee had. Basically, I crashed two of the ships into the sun and then I hit the ] key to switch ships, but I might have hit it twice on accident. Anyhow, the game crashed. Too bad. I was going to see how many ships were left for me to pilot.

[SeaBee]

Oh yes, that font. I forgot to offer my opinion on that, too: it seems a little too bold, and some of the letters ("c" and "o" especially) are difficult to distinguish. It isn't the worst I've seen, but it is distracting.

[chaosavy]

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.

Orb: Q and E are the keys that move the camera up and down.  You are right that W and S are redundant with the zoom, but with this scheme the camera movement keys in Tactical mode correspond with the Ship mode thrusters (currently they work in any direction). Real solution is for me to put in ability for player to map keys. Been meaning to do this for a while. Maybe will get this done this week. Will pass the music kudos to the music maker I agree he's great. There's a few more tracks in the pipe coming soon.

SeaBee: I'll try to track down the [ ] issue, couldn't reproduce it, but I'll look at the code and make it bullet proof. It had crashes before that I fixed (crash would happen if only one object was in the scene and then tried to target another), so I'm not surprised by the crash on your end something else must be bugging it. Speaking of the combat tutorial I just realized that the Outsider fighter (aka the alien guys) was in the tutorial, I must have been doing some tests on the beam weapon and left it in there. Weird "Press the Press" thing, I can reproduce, but I can't the typo in the script, must be in code somewhere, bizzare, thanks for noticing this.

Mouse issue: that's definatly unintended. It should work off of max turning percentage versus where the mouse is past the deadzone.  I wonder what the issue is, I'll have to test out different mice and see what happens. Maybe the solution is to add a mouse sensitivity option. thanks!

webadict: yeah I see what you mean on the c and o. I actually noticed it before but ignored it because the old font was even worse (that's what happens when you get free for anything fonts). I'll have to nail down the tutorials a lot more (you could actually build stations, and other ships totaly undisturbed by the enemy in the current state), fix the annoying pop up.


thanks all! lots of stuff to do!

[webadict]

Oh right! Also something with speed that annoyed me was if I moved side to side, the speed would flicker between 0 and not 0. It did that to me when I was driving at 19 units per second too. I don't know why, but it would flicker between 19 and 19.something. It was just a little minor bug.

Also, crashing ships into the sun is fun.