next »

[Camel]

Hey everyone,

I will try to keep this topic updated with what's happening in Gemini Wars.
Gemini Wars for the people that don't know about it (and I guess it's a lot ), it's a Real Time Strategy Game in space.
We have been working on it for over a year, and it's getting close to the finish line.

--Explosions --

What’s a space game without nice explosions? All big ships have awesome explosions, who doesn’t remember star wars or stargate ships blowing up? If we pay close attention to movies, it usually starts with a chain reaction of small explosions around the ship, and then a huge final explosion as the ship is vaporized.

Well, we want the same in Gemini. And we worked quite a bit at it, making a big ship explode in a cool and epic way is not easy. We want the explosions of space stations and massive ships to be gradual, we want the player in panic and pain witnessing his precious ship being pulverized, or ecstatic at the massive destruction that he’s delivering his opponent. We really believe this is a must for gameplay.

So to achieve this, a ship exploding has two stages:
First, when a ship “dies”, several explosions are set off in key parts of the ship, like a chain of explosions. Then, just before the final explosion the ship is broken into massive fragments.
The original idea we had was to “break” the ship in a modeling program, let’s say in 50 different pieces, attach to them a rigid body, and when the ship is about to explode, just hide the rendered ship and exchange it with these pieces. Then a force would be applied into these pieces and we would let the physics engine calculate the pieces flying away.

Technically it could be done. But it would be a nightmare for a large amount of ships and structures. The player would need a super computer to calculate forces, rigid bodies, etc. In other words, it wouldn’t be a very good solution for slower machines, so, we came up with another solution, much faster than this one.

What we do is still break the ship into pieces and make it explode, still using rigid bodies and forces that PhysX calculate, but all is pre computed into a 3d animation file. So the 3d simulation of breaking parts flying around is no longer using the CPU to calculate all of this in real time, instead we just play back an animation of what PhysX did.So now when a ship explodes, we change the ship object by a low poly version of a ship animation exploding into pieces. The result is pure awesomeness ? and an extremely fast effect.

To make it look better, we unblend an alpha factor on the ship pieces in time, so that when the pieces are moving away they fade out nicely while moving. We made a small video showing USF Battleships exploding:

[Camel]

The enemy has a very well protected asteroid field. This asteroid field is a major problem to our interests; it has a long range cannon installed in it, and it's bombarding our mining facilities at regular
intervals. Adding to it, the Alliance also has a BattleStation close by, and everything‘s protected by a powerful shield generator. These structures are also protected by heavy turrets inside the shield itself, which means that any ships that try to attack this position will be completely exposed to the fire of the heavy turrets without any chance to fight back, as their shots will be stopped by the shield.

The Alliance doesn't have many ships stationed in there; they probably think they won't need them.
So we decided to gather a strong fleet, and try to destroy this Alliance position.
We gathered a fleet of 4 battleships, 4 cruisers, 11 destroyers and 10 Frigates and ordered it to jump out of hyperspace near the asteroid field.



Our fleet gets closer to the Alliance Shield – the Alliance units can be seen inside the shield.



These kinds of shields are very strong, but our battleships have a lot of firepower – they should be able to disable it if they have the chance to concentrate their fire into it. But the Alliance commander will surely move his ships against our fleet to prevent that from happening.



Some of our ships’ long range weapons started firing against the Alliance frigates that are coming out of the shield. We can see one cruiser hitting the massive shield, and its shot being stopped by it.




The Alliance frigates are no match against our fleet’s firepower, and some of them are already exploding in pieces. In the meantime, the shield is now in range of some of our ships. 2 battleships and 3 cruisers start to attack the shield.



We just finished the last frigates, and now we’re hitting the shield.



Our ships keep hitting the shields, and the enemy tries to prevent this, by sending their cruisers against our ships. Two of our destroyers just exploded.



The shield is finally down – our ships can now get closer. The Battlestation has its own shields though, and there are still some enemy cruisers in there, and a lot of heavy turrets.
Let’s see if we have enough firepower to win this battle.



We are now taking heavy losses; one battleship and one cruiser are gone, although we just finished 2 enemy heavy turrets.



There are no more screenshots from this point forward, but we did lose this engagement.
We were able to destroy the enemy Battlestation, but ended up losing all our ships in the process, and the enemy shield generator was not destroyed, so soon enough his shield will be up again.
This attack was a complete disaster  

[Maikel_Ortega]

 

THIS!
 

[Camel]

Captain Thane Magnus is the CO of the 1st Company, 3th Marine Regiment, 88th USF Marine Division.


A veteran of battles in all kinds of environments, he leads the elite of the 3rd Regiment.



Specialized in high risk boarding operations, Magnus’ team is called when failure is not an option.

[Virtanen]

This game looks and sounds amazing.

Is this going to be commercial?
If so, I'd seriously have to consider buying it...

[Camel]

yup, commercial 

[Camel]

Hello everyone,

Today we’re going to show the USF assault dropship AD-5X “Atlas”.
Assault dropships are mainly used by marines. To check out the marines, take a look at the previous post.

Dropships are not carried by all ships; only certain classes of capital ships have detachments of marines on board, ready to strike. The Atlas is used on hot dropzones, where the marines go first to secure the area – like planetary assaults.

In the game, dropships are so small that we basically don’t see much detail on them; however, we do have extensive cinematics in the game, with the purpose of storytelling.
We really want the game to have an epic feeling, and to show how things happen (even planetary battles, which are outside the scope of the game).

So, without further notice, let me present you the Atlas assault dropship. Although the version shown here is unarmed, it usually carries two 30mm cannons, and an array of air to ground missiles and rockets.

This model is made of 150k polys, so it’s really not for real-time use









And a brief glimpse of a cinematic (WIP) where the Atlas can be seen in action:

[aDFP]

OK, that looks amazing, and I'd like to leave it at that, but you posted in the feedback forum, so here's mine...

The explosions look great, and I love what you've done, but I thought the speed the ships flew apart kinda hurt the effect of scale a bit. Whether it's realistic or not, I want to see gigantic spaceships explode slowly, in a massive fireball, and for the pieces to emerge from the explosion, possibly with some pieces moving out faster with a burning trail.

There were a couple more things that I felt spoiled the effect of scale. If the voices stay the same volume, I feel like I've only moved a small distance, so they might be better fading to near-silence. I know it isn't at all realistic, but if I zoom out, I want to feel like I'm miles away from the action, surrounded by the emptiness of space. Personally, I'd have the voices barely audible until you're close enough to breath rocket fumes.

The speed thing also holds for the shots. I don't know how it would impact the gameplay, but to me they look to be moving too fast. Energy beams can be instant, of course, but if anything else is being fired across massive distances, then I feel they would take time to reach their targets.

Maybe even exaggerate the zoom, so that you can move a ridiculous distance away. Gameplay-wise, there's no reason to do so, but the fact that you can will improve the feeling of vastness.

One more point, which is pretty minor. The attack beams from the ships have a dark outline. Against the blackness of space, it looks great, but silhouetted against the ships our the asteroids, it gives the beams a comic-book effect, and makes them look like they're solid, rather than beams of energy.

I feel guilty making any criticism of your work. You've done an incredible job, and I can't wait to play it.

[Camel]

aDFP,

Thanks a lot for your feedback.
It's great to hear that your opinion is similar to other people, that say that the explosions have just too fast.
We will change this, but indeed it makes sense, I don't know why I did it this way
Slowing them down will provide a better feeling of being massive ships.
Gameplay wise, making the beams slower is problematic, the slower they are the bigger than chance of missing a moving ship, and you can have one of this big ships moving slowly tryng to hit a destroyer that moves much faster and being unable to hit it because the beam is just to slow. Making the beam track the target won't work either, this would not be laser beams, it woult be missiles
The beams looking cartoon, I will take another look at them, you might have a point there.
Really, thanks a lot for the feedback.