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[Stuart Morgan]

I'm looking forward to seeing a greater variety of ships and weapon types. Smiley I take it you're going to have defenseless harvester ships that go out and mine the asteroids, yes?

Yes there will be mining ships. Most of the ships can mine by fitting mining laser modules to them, but the specialised mining ship hulls will get a bonus when mining and have a much larger cargo capacity.

[peous]

Loos nice, reminds me SPAZ a bit.
About performance, i dont see why you need to simulate ships that are in other systems; that seems useless
Usually games simulate precisely nearby ships, and another algo decides of big changes in the galaxy using a simpler algo.
Anyway it can't harm to simulate that much ships!
About the name, i think it's cool. Just do some check on Goole to ensure its not used by a similar game

[Stuart Morgan]

Some of the things I have been working on the past few weeks.

Capital Ships and Turret Graphics

Below is the first capital sized ship that I have finished. The two smaller ships you can also see are a Frigate and Cruiser. Ship types that will be capital sized will include Carriers, Battleships, Colonisers and Dreadnaughts.

The plan is for each faction to have at least 6-8 different capital sized ship hulls when the game is finished, there will be a lot of smaller sized ships as they take a lot less GPU texture memory.

I have also redesigned the turret graphics which you can see in the screenshot as I thought the old ones looked rather boring when zoomed in close. Most ships will only be able to fit weapon modules of a certain size (small, medium or large)

(Click images for fullsize)

System View Interface

This is the interface for the system level which displays planets and stargates in the star system. The coloured icons at the center of a planet show which faction has a colony there. When you hover the mouse over a planet it will display a summary of ships there including the total asteroid resources. Ships warping to planets and stargates will be visible on the map here as well.

Galaxy View Interface

Below is a work in progress for the galaxy level interface. The "pie chart" icons show the percentage of planets in the system each faction controls. Each system will display a red glow if a battle is taking place there involving the players colonies or ships.

The reason why the faction controlled territory isnt clustered together as you would expect is because the screenshot was taken in a quick test galaxy where planets were assigned to random factions.

Turret Lights

Made some further changes to ship faction identifying lights so that they get larger and more visible the more zoomed out you are. This makes it easier to see whats going on during massive battles.

[kz012]

The shading and contrast in the image of the ship looks cool! Really digging all the information your packing into the maps as well.

[Dragonmaw]

Please hurry so that I can devour this game. So excite.

[peous]

Nice overall view ! I can't wait to see thousands of ships will be visible on the same global map !!

[Stuart Morgan]

New battle video and some screenshots.





This video shows some of the new projectile based weapons including flak cannons which can damage multiple targets in a short radius. Unlike beam weapons, projectile weapons are not guaranteed to hit the target if they are moving too fast or erratic.

The green beams seen in the video and screenshots are shield assist modules that restore shield hitpoints for a friendly target, still need to think of names for these. There will also be similar modules that repair the hull for a friendly target.

(Click images for fullsize)

[Netsu]

I am so envious of your aesthetics :X
Minimal, clean yet not really abstract. I love it.

[Mattivc]

I love this type of RTS games. Love the clean simplistic visual style you are going for. Keep up the good work.

[peous]

really nice design!
Maybe the rocks should be redesigned to look less like the ships when you look quickly. Maybe they can be more black, less contrasted, without the white border.

[Birdorf]

Not looked at this thread for a while, wow, the new screenshots really grabbed my attention, also loving the overall look. Very impressed, right up my street.

[Stuart Morgan]

Some of the things I have been working on recently.

Fleet Management Interface

I have started on the fleet management screen that shows all your ships including their current orders, location and status as well as the squadron and wing they belong to.

Ships can be dragged around to move them into different squadrons and the squadrons can also be moved into wings which will group them together. Wings dont currently have any purpose other than to make it quicker and easier to assign orders for a large number of ships.

Squadrons can contain up to 9 ships that will move in formation and work together as a team. Theres no limit to the number of squadrons that each wing can have.

You can right click on any of the ships, squadron and wings in the tree view to bring up a context menu that will show a list of available settings and options for them.

(Still a work in progress)

Strafing Attack Runs

Some ships can now make strafing runs when attacking their target instead of just orbiting or chasing them. This will probably be used only for small fast ships such as fighters as it decreases the effectiveness of its weapons as they occassionally go out of range from their target when turning around to start another run.

Text Box GUI Widget

Finished coding multi-line scrolling text box widget's which are used for user input text when renaming things like ships, squadrons, colonies and save game naming. This was quite troublesome and time consuming to code so thought it was worth a mentioning these.

Coding a fully-featured text box from scratch is not fun!

Next I need to fix lots of bugs for the things I have recently added, then soon I will make a start on the high level faction AI (empire building stuff) for computer opponents as they dont currently do anything. 

[Stuart Morgan]

Resource and Items Management

I have had to postpone starting the faction AI as I have been making some major changes to the way resources and items are managed.

When resources are collected such as when some asteroid ore gets processed at a refinery and refined into metal, it will no longer just vanish and get added to the resources total counter at the top of the screen. Instead the metal gets added to the colony inventory and will remain there until its used or moved to another location.

If you have seperate colonies for ore refining, equipment and ship production then you will need to transport the items they require between each of them rather than having your entire empires resources available invisibly no matter where they are being used.

All ships have at least a small cargo hold but I will also add new transport ships that can carry large volumes of cargo but will be quite fragile and defenseless.

This is how the transport orders screen currently looks. I would like to keep it as simple as possible, so I am not adding multiple waypoint settings and items will be seperated into different cargo catagories. If you really need to transport cargo both ways between planets you will need an extra transport ship with different orders although there shouldnt really be a need for this.

Something I am also experimenting with is requiring the "data" produced by research facilities on colonies to be transported back to your designated capital before the points can be spent on research projects.

Most of these changes are to discourage having well defended colonies that are isolated away from your main empire but still be fully functional.

Hopefully this should all make empire building a lot more complex and enjoyable and open up a lot of possibilities for features I would like to add in the future.

[Stuart Morgan]

Some information about galaxy generation in the game with some examples of randomly created galaxies in my latest blog post (too many images to repost here)

[Scott]

I love the visual style here. The asteroids in the screenshots are somewhat hard to distinguish from the ships, but judging from other comments you're aware of issues there. Anyway, I love the visual style here!!

[Stuart Morgan]

I love the visual style here. The asteroids in the screenshots are somewhat hard to distinguish from the ships, but judging from other comments you're aware of issues there. Anyway, I love the visual style here!!

Glad you like it! I recently changed the asteroids slightly to make them more distinguishable.