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.
As I was sculpting that vast open space into terrain it became apparent that my cheap trick showing 3D ranges on a 2D plane was growing old. These yellow transparent spheres now show areas with status effects applied, red and green are weapons and scan ranges respectively.
Note the flat circles within the spheres where the battlegrid intersects them - this further aids depth perception. (Pythagoras you ol' dog, I raise a beer in your honour! Qapla'!)
Homeworld much? <3
Shhh... can't any of you keep a secret?
One thing that always bugged me about the various bubbles in Homeworld was how difficult it was to 'see' their combined AoE when several of them. Not much of a problem on the horizontal plane thanks to the highlighting, but definitely a problem once you leave that plane. One solution is to highlight all the intersections between bubbles, similar to the optical effect of real-world soap bubbles. Or even better to minimize UI clutter: highlight only the intersections which are outside the combined AoE.
Speaking of UI clutter, throw in a way to cycle between showing all AoE effects or only sensors, only weapons, only [status] effects, etc.
> One solution is to highlight all the intersections between bubbles.
Yuck.
> Or even better to minimize UI clutter: highlight only the intersections which are outside the combined AoE.
Yes I looked into this, it would mean building a mesh on the fly which is somewhat outside of my skill level at this time. I know Elite: Dangerous does something (see here: Frontier.co.uk) so it's definitely possible but it looks like a big timesink so I might catch it on another iteration.
Another problem of course is that one asteroid cluster might have a different severity of status effects and some types have more than one - so such a system may not be suitable.
> Speaking of UI clutter, throw in a way to cycle between showing all AoE effects or only sensors, only weapons, only [status] effects, etc.
The spheres are only show at maximum distance from the ship while in orbit cam, you can hide the scan radius' at the minute. Trying not to clutter the UI here, I'm thinking about coding a context sensitive menu system for a couple of other things, so I'll likely use that here.
Thanks!