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[JobLeonard]

But couldn't you also use the height for lighting? (second link). Saves you one drawing, and makes the results more consistent, right?

[friken]

You can, but the results would be far from ideal. Here is info on spritelamp and it's claim to fame, using 5 hand drawn lighting images to create a specialized normalmap allowing for 3d-like lighting on 2d sprite:

http://snakehillgames.com/spritelamp/

We have also added a heightmap / virtual displacement map so we can tilt our sprites on the depth axis and have shifting lighting perspective. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_mapping

The end result is a pretty nice sprite lighting and getting rid of the paper thin feeling of using sprites for space ships. It allowed us to move from 3d ships to 2d ships without losing anything. Overall the effect isn't exact to the 3d lighting model, but close. It allows us to use 2d ships made in far less time for our artist than 2d modeling + texturing, which our team isn't very good at.

[Gregg Williams]

Looks god, but I'm still curious about in-game scale and camera use. So far stuff looks really huge in these shots.

[friken]

Looks god, but I'm still curious about in-game scale and camera use. So far stuff looks really huge in these shots.

I'll post some more videos. I get why you are wondering about scale. The last handful of posts about ship lighting etc were grabbed in a utility I made that allows you to scale the ship way up for tweaking lighting and seeing the details. In-game the ships are much smaller than sun and the camera is auto zooming in or out to keep both player and enemy in frame. Max zoomout is pretty far.. almost icon sized ships.

[friken]

first couple screengrabs of in-game Krex vs Moknon ships:

[Gregg Williams]

Nice, glad to hear you've adopted the traditional camera zooming system. Hows the whole no wrap around working out?

[friken]

Nice, glad to hear you've adopted the traditional camera zooming system. Hows the whole no wrap around working out?

Working out very well. We ditched wrapping a long time ago as it was just too jarring. The wrap w 16:9 aspect ratio was extra odd feeling. I know it worked for oldschool games that were 1:1 square box like starcontrol, but I'm just not feeling it for a modern take on the genre.

Some things will need to be designed to fit, for example AI's that won't run forever increasing the distance. And maybe max distance = retreat for player running from ai. Multiplayer mac distance = draw/retreat. I may set it up to track which player is retreating vs advancing and consider running a defeat or some penalty for multiplayer duels.
 

[Gregg Williams]

I think the biggest problem with no wrap, has always been need for clearly visible boundaries. That and stuff like asteroids have to bounce around oddly. I agree 16:9 makes wrap extra strange in the SC case.

[friken]

I think the biggest problem with no wrap, has always been need for clearly visible boundaries. That and stuff like asteroids have to bounce around oddly. I agree 16:9 makes wrap extra strange in the SC case.

I toyed w boundaries but honestly didn't like the feel, especially in an open, go-anywhere, space game. I think the feel so far (need to do a video of this):

exploration mode (see solar system level view)
see enemy in solar view
get close enough to enemy and it 'zooms into battle'
Battle starts w/ player and enemy a good distance apart.
If player runs much more than the starting distance, it retreats back to solar exploration mode and enemy is lagged in following for player to escape.

[Gregg Williams]

Ah are you abandoning the fixed star lanes than?

Also I was thinking more battle mode myself, but then I was a SC1 fan.

[friken]

Ah are you abandoning the fixed star lanes than?

Also I was thinking more battle mode myself, but then I was a SC1 fan.

not sure what you mean by star lanes?

[Gregg Williams]

In SC1, the map was just stars/worlds, and you only had lines/lanes between each. So every move jumped from to one place to the next. There was no real free form roaming or what not. Cant seem to find a good pic of it.

[friken]

In SC1, the map was just stars/worlds, and you only had lines/lanes between each. So every move jumped from to one place to the next. There was no real free form roaming or what not. Cant seem to find a good pic of it.

Ah, I do recall SC1, so I get what you mean now. It was a lot more strategy game w/ the combat being action. We are going for more of a story/rpg game along the lines of starflight/sc2. We aren't set on the star to star travel yet. I'm currently thinking something between gate-travel ala babylon5 and sc2 type hyperspace.... that could change during implementation

[Gregg Williams]

Ah yeah SC1 was all strategy focus on the map side. So retreating was a confusing concept above heh. Story/RPG hmm, I didn't play Starlight/sc2, now I think I'm glad :D

Keep up the good work though, stuff is looking very nice.

[friken]

Moving from 3d ships to 2d ships wasn't as easy as I thought it would be in unity. We switched over to rigidbody2d and 2d colliders.. but unity hasn't done a very good job making the 2d system seemless move from 3d. There are many missing helper routines like Addrelativeforce, addexplosionforce, forcetypes, and better ways to setup colliders to ignore others. All in all only a day to get around the shortcomings so I can't complain too much.

I took the opportunity to cleanup the way I was doing engine propulsion fx. Here is a capture of the new system. I think it gives a great feedback for building momentum, reverse thrust and turning:

Forgive the capture cutting off too much of the screen. I shrunk the capture area to save size, but made it a bit small:

[Canopus]

Hi, I just found your game. It's awesome and very impressive. I saw it and instantly thought omg! That's SC! Yeah, I'm not the only Blizzard fan here ,just kidding. But I'm sure you already heard that one. Anyway, I guess we both share SCII as root for our games. Nice to meet you.

[friken]

Hi, I just found your game. It's awesome and very impressive. I saw it and instantly thought omg! That's SC! Yeah, I'm not the only Blizzard fan here ,just kidding. But I'm sure you already heard that one. Anyway, I guess we both share SCII as root for our games. Nice to meet you.

Thanks for the kind words. I like the look of your game as well. I hope it is doing well for you.

[friken]

Every great scifi game needs a race of spacebabes.

The Niyette:

[friken]

The Algetron, a sybiotic evolution of crystalline and algae:

[Jeff Skyrunner]

Once again, your artist is very impressive.