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[soryy708]

The game isn't THAT playable yet, so I don't think anybody has any significant progress saved.
I know I don't.
And I didn't even know there's a saving option!

[Ankmannen]

The game isn't THAT playable yet, so I don't think anybody has any significant progress saved.
I know I don't.
And I didn't even know there's a saving option!

The save function is in the current working copy. What I mean is that if I start to introduce autosave that constantly breaks, people might find that annoying. The ability to save however is an important aspect of the joy of the game since it's after all, a game about building stuff. And the game is still only proof of concept. I might scrap it anyhow.

[Ankmannen]

New video. Gameplay from scratch without preloaded resources.

[Ankmannen]

Serialization is complete at the moment. Working on the concept of building new ships/stations/what-ever-you-call-them.

I'm beating around the bush about how to initate such build. First I just made it possible to drop steelblocks (or structure blocks for that matter) into space and a new object in space was created. As shown in this video:

.

A good friend then dropped by and we started talking about it. He suggested that you would have to build a set of magnetic locks and then build your next object while still connected to the first. Not a bad idea.

However, I'm still leaning towards the first way, of simply dropping blocks in space and build on from that.

Any thoughts on the matter?

[soryy708]

Building a fleet shouldn't be trivial.
Craft (or find) a magnetic block, drop it in space, and build on top of that.

[Ankmannen]

Building a fleet shouldn't be trivial.
Craft (or find) a magnetic block, drop it in space, and build on top of that.

Yup, but you also need AI units after you build stuff in space. Otherwise you've just created a metal asteroid. I'm also pondering whether or not to require control engines on the sides of the ship or if that would be to fine grained control. I added fine grained strafeing for docking.

As it looks now it's time to refactor code and optimize some stuff. That means no new features for a while.

[Ankmannen]

Redressing spacealot in a new graphical UI. I'm not a great designer but I pretty much know what I want. This will take a couple of weeks I'm afraid. I'm going for a pragmatic design. A little bit of what space would look like if run by huge cooperation. They wouldn't paint their spacestations in any fancy colors.

I'll try to add some lighting and particle effects (smoke). Also playing with the idea of adding depth, mainly for lighting reasons. That is making the game 2.5D.

The reason why I'm doing this is to get a look a head of what the real product would look like.

Then again, I might change my mind and work on some other new cool feature instead.

[Ankmannen]

I realized I needed to add construction delays. Said and done.

[Ankmannen]

GAH! Refactored the object hierarchy to fit the world a little better. Somehow I got an unexpected performance boost of about 25%. The refactoring sprint seems to be taking a little longer than expected but it really solodifies my model.

My aim at the moment is a totally glitch free experience when blocks are loaded, generated and unloaded.

Also had to redesign the relative position system to avoid accidental loss of precision.

[Ankmannen]

Was supposed to go to bed early. Created a repair system for blocks.

When a block is damaged it will use 1 energy per tick to heal 0.1 Health Points for a block. Out of energy, no way to repair your ship. This goes for any object that has an energy source and a Control unit (AI or cockpit).

Realize I need some fancy/easy way to control this in battle. Probably a Three-Point slider in a triangle with each point being WEAPONS, SHIELDS, REPAIR. Then you can quickly position a point inside and deside where you want to put your energy resources.

[Ankmannen]

Added a console output at lunch. Also shows the repair system in action when I accently crash into an asteroid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnDhaXlyqFQ&feature=youtu.be

[soryy708]

Looking good!
But with this insane ship speed, battles can turn out very intensive and you might be unable to find the time to move the energy allocation triangle.

I can think of two ways for solving this:
1: Pause the game but still able to issue commands (FTL?)
2: When in combat, slow the game down

[Ankmannen]

Looking good!
But with this insane ship speed, battles can turn out very intensive and you might be unable to find the time to move the energy allocation triangle.

I can think of two ways for solving this:
1: Pause the game but still able to issue commands (FTL?)
2: When in combat, slow the game down

Yup the ships speed is a problem. I'm thinking about "gamifying" the distances.

I also need to prevent hyperdrive jumps while in battle. Probably by forcing the user to gather energy, meaning power of lasers and shields and if in battle, kill your self doing so. I don't want to add rules for no reason. A player should be forced to play a certain way or they would simply die.

Slowing the game down is also an option. I didn't like it at first, but now I'm starting to ponder it. I might try it. I realize I need to add some more real enemies to try the different options out.

[Ankmannen]

Finally reworked serialization to a flexible and stable state (knock on wood). It is still, however, based on xml.

I added a console output to the user to be able to give feedback. Health and repair system is working but might need some finetuning. Everything is based around the amount of energy you have.

Upcoming areas of development

1) Star system generation - need to dynamically generate a solar system. With the current hyperdrive you cannot reach another star yet so that might also be included in this.

2) Shields - we need shields. You're pretty much doomed if you go into battle at the moment. For this I need to define the entire process of creating shields. From raw material to crafting and processing. This is my achilles heel since the balance needed here is vital to how much fun the gameplay would be.

Annoying stuff

1) The cursor is lagging in fullscreen mode? Even when FPS is at 60 and CPU is low. You move your mouse and the cursor is 30 frames behind. Gotta research this more. In windowed mode there is no problem.

2) The graphics really need to be redone. I need to fix a graphic baseline to work from. But I rather create new features since I suck at graphics.

[Ankmannen]

Adding menus. Somehow it feels more like a game if there's menus. Solved the mousepointer lag issue by disabling vsync and introducing a semi-fixed update for the physics. Works fine at the moment. All of those settings will be found in the menus to play around with. Also Multisampling will be an option.

I'm feeling very confident with the progress of the game. I know exactly how I want it and I think that's a first. I also don't have any rush and that's good since time is not freely available at the moment.

[Ankmannen]

The basic shield is now implemented. I've been thinking a lot about how they should work. At the moment they work as one unit and share a common shield state. No matter what shield is hit, they act as one. For that I get a general shield level that is going to be displayed in the same way as the energy meter.

I'm planning for the addition of a shield controller so that you can focus whatever shield strength left to a certain side of the ship. Think Star Trek.

[Ankmannen]

Decided to bring this project back online after letting it slumber for half a year! Fixed SharpDX support to get rid of any dependency of Microsoft XNA bineries. Simpler to distribute this way and it also can give the end user the option to use OpenGL.

In the nearest future, I'll spend som time on energy management and UI to make it look nice.

[Ankmannen]

Been working on selection stuff. Box selection, multiple selections, add/remove from selection. Also, tried to make the HUD a little bit nicer.

Next step is to be able to track objects you create, like mining bots, and to issue commands to them.

[Ankmannen]

Ah, back in business again!

Worked on a lot of cool features.

New stuff:

* Conveyor belts that transport stuff to and from storage units
* Tritium powered fusion reactors
* Scanning feature in radar
* Console

[Ankmannen]

Ok, so last nights work was about getting conveyor belts to work in all directions to be able to set up proper logistics between processing units. The example below converts oilsand to raw oil and then into plastic. This is an example of a simple production line that you could construct.

The game is going to be about finding resources and producing new stuff. The next item on my to-do list is to add an auto-crafting unit that lets you create a crafting template and assembles more complex items for you. For example, you can turn iron ore into steel, and then using an auto-crafter, turn it into sheet metal. Passing the sheet metal to Another auto-crafter turning it into empty pods that then gets passed into another processor to be filled with tritium to fuel your ship with.