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[Farbs]

Hi TIGers,

Long time no see!

Many years ago I built Captain Forever, which spun out into a multitude of sequels including the ultimate episode Captain Jameson. Jameson development faltered a little when I got caught up in Card Hunter, but now it's back, booting its way past the heliosphere as The Dawn Star.

Here's a Gameplay Video!

The Dawn Star uses Captain Forever's ship construction and flight mechanics as a foundation for a massive voyage into the unknown, exploring vast formerly-inhabited starscapes. Nearly everything in TDS does something, so exploration isn't just about finding new rocks to look at, it's about finding new opportunities and resources.

My goal with The Dawn Star is to course-correct the Jameson project, navigating it away from a few interesting but ultimately erroneous early decisions. For instance, the Captain Forever series is all drawn in neon wireframe. That looks cool, but it incorrectly communicates that the game is very small, and it has substantial performance issues when running at a modern full screen resolution. So, I'm building a new renderer! The Captain Forever games also refused to acknowledge that they were in fact games, and so have no menu screens, no title sequences, no music, and so on. This was cool but ultimately degraded the experience, especially in regard to music, so The Dawn Star is throwing that rule out!

Preview of the new renderer

I work on The Dawn Star four days a week, and will post at the end of each day with a summary of that day's achievements and/or excuses. This is as much for my own motivation as anything else, so I hope you don't mind if this thread devolves into me shouting at myself a bit.

So... here we go! I'll post again in a few hours with my first daily report. See you then!

[danieru]

 So, as someone unfamiliar with Captain Forever would you mind if I ask a silly question? What language / platform is The Dawn Star being development in?

[Farbs]

Yeah of course! The Dawn Star is being built in Flash, using the original Captain Forever games as source. It's getting a fancy new Stage3D-based deferred lighting renderer so that every thruster and every laser bolt can be a light source.

At the moment people play alpha builds of the game in-browser, but I'll ship it as a desktop application via AIR when it's finished.

[Muzz]

i <3 farbs. I loved the shit out of captain forever.

I'll be keeping an eye on this.

[Farbs]

Aw, thx Muzz

It's nearly close-of-business, so it's time to write up my day!

On The Dawn Star I worked on the core rendering framework, and now have geometry rendering to offscreen buffers then on to the backbuffer, w/ gamma correction and an opportunity to tone-map later if that seems like a good idea. I'm right at the brink of implementing my main MRT pass, writing out a diffuse texture, a lower circular harmonic occlusion layer, a higher circular harmonic occlusion layer, and the emissives & environment lights all in one go. That's... a big step. But it'll be cool to get there.

Unfortunately (?) my afternoon was eaten by Card Hunter, because I finally got an opportunity to test the experimental co-op feature. Then I had to test it some more. Then some more. Now if you'll excuse me I just need to...

[Farbs]

DAILY UPDATE!

Ow, what a day. Scout - the tool I'd usually use to peek at what the video card is doing - doesn't seem to be compatible with the new render functionality. Having it show the output I'm expecting while the game itself shows a blank screen... isn't exactly helpful.

I've fallen back to coding in very small increments, so I can see which steps cause it all to fall apart. There's not much point writing a whole complex system in one go if the only observable output is a blank screen.

I often liken coding to spelunking, where you have to move very slowly and very carefully and keep your patience at all times. Rush or lose your head and you'll catch a rock to the face very quickly. Today was like that, but without a torch. Fun!

[Farbs]

"I stumbled across an old wireframe-rendered atmosphere station. Figured I'd take a picture."

It works! The core of the deferred render is now up and running, complete with... one sprite. But that's a good enough start. I think it's going to be pretty fun from here on out adding new module sprites and render systems. Next I'll add mip-mapping, a new atmosphere renderer, and then a pile of new placeholder sprites. Attaching things to the chunky new command module feels really nice, and I'm itching to attach new modules that are chunky themselves.

If you're a Captain Forever supporter you can play the new build here, including a new universe seed. Enjoy!

[Muzz]

Looks good.

So far that sprite looks like a tech test. What are you thinking of for the visuals of the ships?

[Farbs]

Yeah, that sprite's just based on a model I slapped together in sketchup.

I figure the ship modules will all be modeled using the original silhouettes from the existing art style, then detailed and greebled up a bit. Inspiration will also come from 1960s-80s NASA craft and the ISS.

There's currently a diffuse layer in action, I just haven't drawn anything into it I'll use that to add a bit more detail and possibly some paint to differentiate between the various module levels. There'll also be a lot of little light sources (complete with coronas) on the ships. I think that'll work? If needs be I'll find an artist to help out, but I'd like to see how far I can get first.

[Farbs]

Today was mostly spent on texture atlas tools, so I can show more than one module type at a time Once that's in place I'll mock up some more modules so we can fly entire spaceships made of this stuff. Fun!

I also mucked around with diffuse details a bit, with a dirt layer and a generic "spaceship" texture from somewhere on the 'net. I'll probably dial it back, but it's been fun to add.

[suggo]

Awesome! This is already looking super cool. I shall be watching as things progress!

[Farbs]

Cheers suggo!

I have texture atlases working now, so I can finally start building all the different modules. Here you can see an attempt at a girder. I'm still really not sure how I want these to look, but I feel I've gone too Red Dwarf and not far enough Space Shuttle / ISS. My plan for now is to build all the modules anyway and to use these as an experiment in styles and techniques. Hopefully I'll zero in on something along the way, so I can double back and remake everything the way I want it. Still, I'm pretty happy to have a mostly 3D ship up on the screen. It'll be awesome to see the rest of the 'verse come together.

[Farbs]

Fear my interstellar crayons!

Hmm. These new weapons didn't work out so well. Still, it's not an experiment without a chance of failure right?

I've mostly been bugfixing these past few days. The module colouring shader was having particular troubles with orange, and I was having to restart FlashDevelop every time I wanted to run the game. Also Sketchup was creating backward facing normals, which made my pre-render process go completely nuts and spam shadows all over the place.

Anyhow, that's all squared away now so I can continue mucking about with module shapes and textures to try to define the aesthetic.

Which module should I do next?

[Farbs]

Look! It's a whole ship!

So that's cool. I think now that I have an entire ship worth of modules I'll actually go learn how to model and texture, and try to refine it down into something that looks a bit cooler. It's a decent start though I think.