Hello everyone and welcome to our first progress update report since the release of Space Crusade 0.5A! There is a ton to go over so let's start.
This update is not going the to be familiar "info dump" that most of them have been or at least not in the same way. The reason for this is that I forgot to make changelog notes for about half of March. It is quite easy to get caught up in debugging and make ten changes and forget to record them because you are doing epic battle with a bug the size of Godzilla. This is how it has been for most of March and some of February.
So let's start off with the obvious, I have been releasing new builds of Space Crusade throughout March. These builds represent a certain time's worth of debugging and feature adding. The amount of time between each build is cumulative, each new build adds another week onto the development time for that particular build. This was a concious choice to allow the later builds to be more comprehensive while the earlier builds could be more about quickly turning out a new build that fixed some of the lager, game breaking bugs.
I am currently working on the final build for 0.5A, the 5th build. It will be completed on April 15th. At that point I will begin the important work on Space Crusade 0.6A which will have out 100% modding support solution although require me to make a hell of a lot of changes since many values will need to be pulled out of the code and placed into an external file.
Version 0.6 will take appx. 2 to 4 months to a max of 6 months to complete or at least that is my current time frame. I will not be doing build-releases after this next one is done and instead each version will get a month of debugging time and then whatever was not fixed or caught will be dealt with in the next version. Version 0.9 will be the final text-based version of the game.
Version 1.0A will take about a year to a year and a half to complete and will be our first 3D version of the game. My current goal is for a commercial release of the game by version 2.0.
Here is a list of bugs, linking to the bug reports, for all of the bugs squashed up to this point in 0.5A and all subsequent builds:
As you can see it was a busy month. About as much as added to the game as was fixed. Just to highlight some of these changes:
Asteroid belt and asteroid generation, asteroid mining, the ability to sell items, ship storage, implementation of a cargo space unit (setigrams² or sg², which is equal to nine tons [one sg is 3 tons]), and the inclusion of a casino at stations.
There have been several major changes made tot he code over the last couple of weeks. With the inclusion of the mining system I had to do extensive work on stations and ships so that both would take advantage of the storage system but also so that the storage could be accessed and manipulated from the station. This required the creation of a new ship class that would essentially act as a data holding class for stored ships.
These changes also facilitated some massive expansion and reworking of the database. New fields were added to several tables including a field that allows for the storage system to function properly. This change was done because of how the storage system has been altered. Storage "slots" have been removed as a means of storage limitation and instead the limitation focuses solely on the space taken up by items. Naming of that space is what this new database element is doing as well as defining the weight of the item being stored in setigrams².
I also decided to start my table consolidation pass during build 4. What I am planning to do is put many of the singular databases together into one larger database. Then, instead of accessing ten tables in the database for all of the stuff needed we only access one and selectively return data from that table for what is required by a specific item type. This will help clean up quite a bit of scope slippage that has occurred in the code as a result of having all of these different tables to have to account for.
In 0.6 I am going to be folding weapons and ships into the Equipment_Data table which will complete the consolidation in the database and I can go about reworking the code to take advantage of it. I also found some major problems with the loading code as accessed if you have already started or loaded a game, thus that option (to load from the in-game menu) has been disabled for the time being.
For the most part planet and ship battle has been debugged however there are still sporadic issues that are seeming to pop up. I have not been able to track down where or how these problems are occurring but once we get to a point where more people are helping us debug the game the problem should become more obvious. The game will also now track your kills although I still do not have a way for you to rank up yet. I was going to add that in build 4 but the problems with Ship and the require of the Ship2 class + the cargo storage/access code pushed that back until the current build.
I also added in some code, and tested it, that will de-level you if you die and use a clone that removes enough CEXP to bring your total CEXP below the amount required for your current level. This will also be extended to your skills once we have added that system in (likely in 0.6 but definitely by 0.7).
Asteroid belts have been added to planets, along with asteroids, as part of the mining system. How mining works is that you are required to have a mining laser equipped. Currently I am unsure if the buying process works for them so I recommend adding them to your ship manually in the PShip_WHPVect table. You can find the relevant IDs in the weapon_data table. Be sure to change the weapon type to mining laser as well.
At the moment the game will use whatever you last mining laser is for mining. I will be working on a menu that will allow you to choose which to use in 0.5. In 0.6 I will remove this and add in multi-threading so that each laser can work independently. This is not possible in the current code because you cannot have more than one timer that runs correctly (to my knowledge though I never tested multiple timers with the code I am using).
After the cycle duration has expired (anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes), the game will load ore onto your ship. If you have more ore at the end of the cycle than can be stored the game will notify you of what amount of ore was destroyed. It will also, now, notify you when you add ore to an already existing pile of it; before it did not and that lead to some confusion. You cannot yet process ore into resources but that is coming in build 5 along with more ore types.
Another sub-project I have been undertaking this last development cycle has been to start brainstorming ideas for ships. to that end I have compiled 12 rough, and I must overemphasize rough, concept sketches of some ships that will appear in the game. Note that I suck at drawing and I lmao at some of these myself when I looked at what I had done.
Here are the scanned images in slide form but I will also be uploading them to the images section:
S15.photobucket.com (click on the link, ModDB apparently does not like IFrames unless they are from specific sources).
As a king of map legend let me explain what some of the chicken scratch you see before you means. areas that are darkened represent areas of the ship surface that are recessed into the surface of the ship. Areas that are striped indicate sections of the ship that are holes. Any non-shaded and non-striped section that is placed onto of another such section represents an elevation in the ship hull or some kind of protrusion that goes over the ship (like a wing or engine loop).
Some of these are simple doodles that just came to me while others are creations inspired while mining in Eve and looking at some of the ship designs.
I also touched on the audio segment of the game again this time however we have the first tangible audio, read as audio that will be used in the game or in promotion of the game, made as of yet. The first piece is going to be used in the game. In some games the only indication that there are enemies around is a red flashing icon somewhere in the UI. In Space Crusade there will be, in addition to that, an audio keynote that enemies are abroad. That is what this first audio clip represents.
I am still working on it, obviously, but as far as structure goes it will be very similar to this albeit possibly of lower volume and a little less reverby.
The second audio track is something more grandiose. It will be used as the trailer music for the game once it is ready to be released. The song will be based off of three artistic inspiration points:
1. My own rat's maze of a brain
2. Moonlight Sonata
3. Final Preparations by Stoyan Ganev
At the moment I am still trying to piece together Final Preparations by ear before going in and changing things with the other two sources of inspiration that I have listed, so if sounds very similar. To be fair to the composer my version is not an exact copy but follows the general theme, instruments, and tempos as best as I can determine by listening to the music an ungodly number of times (up to 548 times so far).
Here are those:
Next I would like to formally announce, on ModDB anyway, the opening of the official website for Space Crusade. I will be working on it continuously for the duration of the development of the game and working out new features. Currently you can view some information about the universe of the game, download the game, watch some of our YouTube media, and also access other related websites from the Space Crusade website. I have also added an orb to lmpgames.com that leads to Space Crusade's website.
Go check it out and let me know what you think: Sc.lmpgames.com
Finally here are the developer's vlog videos. Currently only the first one is up but I will begin uploading two more today and will do so per day until all remaining 17 videos are uploaded.
That is everything for this update. Thanks for following the project!
-SC Development Team
