Finally
After a lot of trial and error, I have managed to do the first combat test. It pits 30 frigates against a single enemy structure. You can watch the video below:
Game Mechanics
Please masternerdguy, tell me more about this! No problem! I was thinking about space combat and the sheer amount of friendly fire there would be, that I decided that friendly fire was a vital component of the game. Bullets are indiscriminate in what they damage!
This means that fights involving large numbers of ships orbiting and strafing will result in large amounts of stray bullets and missiles. This means that there will be tons of collateral damage during a fight.
Holding Still...Lame
Patience please. Holding still is a great way to test their ability to generate a bullet, aim, and fire. They have done well on 2 of those, aiming seems to be a slight challenge for them (the problem lies in the fact that my game engine is only accurate down to 1km when working with trajectories).
I have a plan to fix it by desyncing bullets from the rest of the game engine so they can have a denser coordinate plane and more freedom of movement, and thus aiming.
Orbiting and strafing runs will be the coolest behaviors. Let's compare holding still with those:
- Strafing: Makes you harder to hit while still giving you a fairly easy time aiming.
- Orbiting: Makes you hardest to hit, however reduces the accuracy of non guided weapons significantly.
- Holding Still: Easy to hit, but your high damage poor aiming guns will have a the best chance to hit.
Once I make bullets have finer tuned flight paths, the sky is the limit. This will take a while, however, because of the work in giving bullets their own coordinate plane while keeping them connected to objects in the standard one.
Current Goals
Now that basic combat is implemented, I am going to focus on adding orbit and strafing behaviors to units. Then I will allow you to fit a behavior to a unit. Then, I want to work on the coordinate plane problem so bullets can be aimed more easily. Finally, I will be adding frigate manufacturing to the AI.
It sounds good, I will play it when it comes out....
sounds indeed good!
Looks horrible
you may find is horrible but making a game is hard :)
When I saw the name, I thought of a 3D space simulation. When I saw it I was very surprised! A 2D game with BOXES insted of ships and a type of gameplay I can't recognize because of all those lines.
I know its very hard to make a whole game (from my own experience), but a 3D engine is a thing you should add with souch a cool name! Even now the mini games you can buy for a dollar have 3D stuff. Getting 3D models isn't that hard (also from my experience).
Don't be offenced. I'm just trying to help you to improve the game you spend your time on.
boxes are due to zooming out, you can zoom down to see the ships.
Lines are like the lines in all RTS games that tell you what you've ordered a unit to do.
I could scrap all my 6 months of work and go do a 3D engine...or I can do what I intended and emphasis depth over looks. Remember I am making this game because I got bored of Sins of a solar empire's limited game play.
i like the concepts present here, it looks like you've got a deep game coming.
I do have one question tho, what if you have 2 ships strafing parallel to each other, does that then count each ship as 'standing still' in terms of accuracy? Or are you not going to take velocity/inertia and all that rot into account.
They would likely not hit each other, but I am adding some fittable equipment similar to the stasis webifier in eve online that significantly reduces target velocity.
Ty for the comment. When I get the AI building and ordering its own units, I will test this and get back to you ^^
Really liking what i am seeing here!
about the graphics thing, dwarf fortress being the perfect example of how a 3d game engine isnt really neccecary.
just keep up the good work and when you get the chance work on the sprites abit or even do what AI WARS did initially, take free sprites, if only to get things going witha abit more graphical appeal.