Shallow Space is a 3D Real Time Strategy game inspired by Nexus: The Jupiter incident and Homeworld. Shallow Space focuses on organised mass RTS space combat in a fully 3D environment. Ships in Shallow Space are nearly always grouped into Flotillas and Wings, and orders issued to these structures cascade to the subordinate members. Rather than stressing out clicking on the units or dragging selection boxes during the heat of battle, standing orders are issued in advance leaving you to zoom around, activating abilities and arranging support and reinforcements. Should the tide turn in battle traditional control is still available.
Just testing and improving the AI interactions and a bit of benchmarking, overloaded this scene a little but performance is still a tad shy of where I want it. Will soon write in fog of war, I suspect that will improve things.
How are you implementing fog of war? Was just thinking how it would be grand to be able to see battles in the distance, even if there is a 'patch' of fog of war in-between the locally-focused ships and the friendlies in the distance. Does that make sense?
Can't think now how Homeworld handled that scenario... I suspect the draw distances weren't sufficiently great enough for such a situation to occur.
Funnily enough I was just testing a fog of war solution today, I think you'll basically only see what is within the ships scan ranges. With larger objects (asteroids and stations) dimmed but still visible, you will of course be able to see what your allies can see.
So what are the performance requirements as is?
*At this very moment what do we need to run it smoothly?*
It doesn't look too resource intensive, but looks are always deceiving. (learned that the hard way :P)
I just couldn't commit to specs without more performance testing and tweaking! It runs sweet as a nut on a Precision M3800 (even at 2K and pretty well at 4K) and quite well on a MacBook Pro 2013 (with ATI dedicated GPU.)
GPU doesn't bother it much It really likes a decent CPU as there is quite a lot of computational stuff going on, the asteroids don't seem to matter its the ships. Its a time consuming task of adding features, testing, fixing, optimising at the minute - not an easy job but we'll get there.