Arne's SC project

[Arne]

So, well, here I am. I resumed my SC project, maybe. Some of you might have seen my earlier stuff over at the UQM forums.

Here's a LINK to the project page. Haven't been updated for a while.

I'm basically just toying with the idea of having different ship types for each species, then doing a 2D space RTS of some sort. It's pretty cumbersome to do all the stuff on my own, but that way I get to decide everything myself, which is neat! 



Supox battle platform. Got some empty or temporary turret slots.




Debris for the crab ships. There'll be generic tech debris for most species, but also larger parts for each ship. Then there's a disabled version, and split in half version. Something like that anyways.




Syreen WIP. 

[Chrispy]

That is awsome stuff! I love all of them, but i think that the syreen needs more feminin hands, and sexy glowing green eyes... otherwise... wow Im blown away!

[Sedodes]

Wow, nice art.  Concept reminds me of a "Starscape meets SC2" idea I heard somewhere a while back.

[Moronic Maria]

Hi. I saw your art a few weeks back at UQM, and it's awesome as usual. Beautiful work.

[Megagun]

Hey, waitaminute... Aren't you the guy that made the art for "DIRT" (aka "D.I.R.T.")?

Man, this world is small..

[Arne]

Thanks! I'll size down that hand. I have to let pieces rest for a while because I get biased/blind while painting.

D.I.R.T is a collab, I'm doing GFX mostly, but a bit gamedesign and tool programming too, but I pretty much stink at coding.

However, I just finished this baby.



EXCITING HUH? Well, I'm excited anyways. This means I can finally do games with tons of enemies and stuff updated. It's a system that allow the program to know a bit better what enemies are near an arbitrary section of the map. Otherwise I'd have to check all objects every time I want ot compare them or draw them on screen.
Now I can like multitask the entire Zelda 1 map, or something. Not sure if it's useful for this project though. An quad/oct tree (whatever) is probably better for space stuff.

[Arne]

Worked a little more on the Syreen. I have no compositional idea whatsoever.



Also wrote some rotation code that seem to work.

[GeomanNL]

Hi, I'm coding an RTS game (originally intended to be a adventure), using 2d sprites and such, which resembles a little what you're making - adapted from timewarp, hence the 2d. It'll take me at least half a year to get it to work, with no guarantee it'll ever get completed, but maybe we could stay in touch and exchange some ideas.

edit: here's a link to the project page twx.sourceforge.net. Content is a little outdated, though.

[Arne]

That's a good idea. It seems very few people are interested in my project so I'm coding it myself it seems. Because of this, I've made it as easy to code as possible while trying to make the most out of the gameplay.

For example, a ship will just be one frame that is rotated ingame, or half a frame even since it's symetrical. This allows me to paint 2*frames as many ships, which I think is more important than having pretty light angles.

The game just takes place in one mode, topdown space. There are no zones or warp space. Planets are just a little info page with text and pictures of enviroments/life, which saves me the trouble of doing planet stuff. Finding life can boost certain research though. Building is made with an orbital station that 'magically' sucks up resources each game-tick. This means I don't have to bother with planet-space mechanics and everything can take place in normal 2d space. 

The tough part is the diplomacy AI and pilot AI of course, but atleast there's no terrain pathfinding.
I reckon it could be coded in a few months by a leet coder. The gfx will take longer though since I'm painting everything. Each race has like 1-15 ships, and there's be hundreds of planets (I'll probably make some generic moons, gasgiants though). All life will be unique too, maybe 100 pics.

[GeomanNL]

I've implemented a more complicated game model, with hyperspace, truespace, and planet-view, like sc2. All is seen in top-view mode.

I use the timewarp algorithm, so ships are rotated 64 frames when loaded, or they can be pre-rendered, in 64 frames; and then it's only a matter of scaling. On top, each frame is cached, so that scaling doesn't have to repeated again and again if it's not necessary, you just draw the cached bitmap.

Planets are calculated real-time, and rotate. Their image consists of a 2:1 ratio rectangular bitmap, which is projected onto the screen in a circle, as if it's 3d.

These are my gameplay ideas, I keep them simple, at least for version 1.0 of the game:

I'm not planning to include research.
Building can only be ordered from homeworlds, and take time to build (time is the only resource).
Colonies can speed up building on homeworld (how much faster depends on the race).

Each race has 1 fighter ship type, 1 colony ship type, and 1 construction ship type (for constructing 1 type of defence struct).
You can diversify your fleet by allying or conquering other races.

I gather that one race has a certain liking or disliking of allying with another race. I'm not sure how to do this, yet. Perhaps it just influences how many ships you must destroy before they join your alliance, or how much you've to pay (e.g. a number of colonies).

I'm planning to force some strategy in the game, by disallowing ships to fly far from homeworlds or colonies. When they travel, they've to make stops at colonies to refuel. In that way, you can create strategic crossway points which one can defend.

Life: I let life depend on the type of planet surface, temperature on the planet, and/or presence of an atmosphere. These lifeforms are viewed top-down, and consist of about 4 bitmaps which form an animation.

In principle I can make a game with a very large starmap and many ships ; I've not reached this stage yet and don't know how many ships there can be, realistically, as all has to be calculated in real-time.

For AI, I'm using a hierarchical model (kinda like squad-ai):
weapon - ship - fleet - commander - race,
so you've race AI which determines very general strategy, some kinda commander AI which orders fleets, fleets which order ships if they enter battle, and ships use their weapons. In each layer, a decision is made about the behaviour of a "lower" entity. This is in very early early stages.

[GeomanNL]

PS.
* You could consider using part of timewarp, or twx code, or maybe another open-source game, as a starting point for your game, although you'll probably end up rewriting a lot of code.
* You could subdivide your capital ships into smaller parts, which can take independent damage. I made one such a thing in timewarp.

[fossaman]

Geoman, I have a suggestion for you on the diplomacy section. At the beginning of each new game, you can assign a value from 0-100 for each race. The closer the numbers of each race are, the more likely to ally with you they are.

If you want to get fancy, you could set it up so that specific actions move that race's or your race's number. For example, destroying their ships makes them like you less, until you destroy a certain number, and then they start liking (or fearing) you more. You could have the initial numbers be fixed, and have actions affect a modifier, instead, if that makes more sense to you.

[Scott_Irving]

Just so you know arne, im following your project =) I just don't have any programming knowledge worth speaking of so I just sit by and watch as things progress. Btw where did you learn to draw like that? is in hand drawn? or digital drawing??
I wish i could do stuff like that it would certainly go a long way in my movie project!

Anyway best of luck!

[Arne]

Geoman> Ah, your project is quite different then.
For the ship damage I don't know if I should just have single hitpoint stat or individual zones. It's tricky because the shots can only hit the edges of the ship, and the turrets and vital parts are further in. I could simply calculate from what angle the shot hits and have a table with damage zones for certain angles. I won't use crew as hitpoints though. Instead I'll make a heighmap and calculate the amount of pixels the ship uses in total. Those pixels are used to calculate armour, weight, storage space, cost, etc etc. Much like Elite II.

For collision detection, I want to use vectors, but I'm no good at intersection math so most likely I'll just cheap out with some pythagoras.

Although I've got experience with most languages, I prefer Basic. Computers now can actually run it at a decent speed. I only understand code if I write it myself, and sometimes not even then.


Scott> I've skipped the social part of life. It's pencil thumbnails and digital paint.

[GeomanNL]

arne: Different indeed. I wish I could help. In principle I could program the game-map and ships for you, since I've to do that anyway for twx, but then you'll still be left with a lot of things, and it's in C++, and my progress is rather slow
EDIT: (nah forget it, I'm being delerious, I can't work on 2 projects at the same time )

In principle, turrets can be attached to a zone; when that ship area is crippled, so is the turret. Having separate parts makes making the ship quite a lot more complicated to program and design though.

For what it's worth, I think vectors are probably best in your case. Maybe I should use something like that, too (I'll keep it in mind for future use).


>fossaman: that's an interesting idea.