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TIGSource ForumsCommunityJams & EventsCompetitionsOld CompetitionsCockpit CompetitionSublight (late entry) [FINISHED+VIDEO]
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Author Topic: Sublight (late entry) [FINISHED+VIDEO]  (Read 8799 times)
Will Vale
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« on: April 01, 2009, 05:05:14 PM »

Latest version:

Download Sublight

You'll also need the VC 2008 redist and DirectX websetup.

Here's a video:





Earlier versions:

Download demo of Sublight
Download work-in-progress demo of Sublight
Download sketch of Sublight

Instructions - "Sublight: It's more a game mechanic than a game."

Pick a difficulty level to start.

  • You are training to be the sensor operator on a warship, looking at your sensor displays. The large space on the left is your mass detector - blips will appear there and move around. Your job is find out what they are as quickly as possible.


  • To do this, click on a blip to target it. Your tracking radar will start scanning back and forth in the direction of the blip, and you'll see the radar return as a moving line in the top right display. This will give you an idea of the shape and orientation of the target.


  • Click on the ship outlines below the tracking radar to page through the different ship types. Once you've decided which one you're looking at, click 'DESIGNATE' to mark the current blip with its ship type.


  • Rinse and repeat for the remaining blips. At the end of the session you'll see how many you got right, and how quick you were on average.

HINTS/SPOILERS:

The small triangular fighters are easy to spot, and you can usually tell one before scanning it just because it's moving fast.

The long carriers are also really easy to spot, particularly as they pass your ship and reveal their profile.

Distinguishing between battleships and corvettes is hardest since they (purposefully) have similar shapes at different sizes.


Original post

Hi folks,

I managed to snatch some time last night to get my flight-to-GDC project into something which might be interesting. Very much not finished, but you can see how the mechanic might work.

The idea is that you're a sensor operator on a 2D space ship - you can see contacts (+) on the search display and click on them (LMB) to lock on. At this point your tracking sensor will scan back and forth and show you the shape of the target. You can use (RMB) to toggle the box2d debug draw and see how the sensor return matches up to the physical ship.

That's about all there is at the moment, but the goal is that you have a flipbook of ship silhouettes and have to figure out which one the wavy line on your screen really is. Rather than doing a whole space combat game, I want to dress this up as sensor training, and probably give you some control over the beam width (and hence speed vs resolution of the return).

It's pretty obvious, but I do actually want to do a whole space combat game (of which this sensor mechanic is a small part) but at my usual rate of an hour or two a week this is what there is so far Smiley

Have fun, let me know if you have problems, and thanks for the inspiration as ever. I'll try and get the flipbook in tonight and move the scan onto a separate display, at which point I can make the scale more realistic.

Cheers,

Will

« Last Edit: April 21, 2009, 03:19:11 AM by Will Vale » Logged
nihilocrat
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« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2009, 11:04:00 AM »

Pretty cool concept, I could see it as being a neat mini-game in a bigger game like it seems you're planning.

Sometimes an errant ray can bounce from one ship to another one, but I bet that's intended. The rays seem to reflect really funny sometimes, it seems to happen when the ships are coming at you from an orthogonal angle, or maybe when there are lots of ships close together:


Shot at 2009-04-03
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Will Vale
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« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2009, 12:23:46 AM »

Thanks for trying and commenting - I agree it's a pretty thin concept at the moment, but I like the idea of prototyping meaty avionics in a bigger game this way.

You can get ray contacts (red traces) off anything with a physics presence - so duplicate or confusing contacts are intentional - but in v1 the physics models are too large relative to the separation of the ships and it all turns into a big mess.

I've tidied up the UI a little bit so that you can see the sensor returns separately from the scan radar, and added the flipbook of silhouettes. Still no real gameplay, but I'm fighting jetlag at the moment (it's 28 hours since I left San Francisco, and that was at 9pm local time) so I'm not going to get much further before the deadline. I've posted the latest version in the first message of this thread.

At some point I'm going to enter one of these compos with enough time to actually finish something Smiley I've done some art stuff for SL though and I'll integrate that tomorrow.

Cheers,

Will

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Will Vale
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« Reply #3 on: April 06, 2009, 03:29:43 PM »

OK, so this is playing fast and loose with the deadline - the official compo version should probably be version 2, but version 3 is closer to what I intended - I'll leave it up to the Powers That Be to decide which to judge Smiley

I've dressed up the graphics a little and hooked up the 'DESIGNATE' button so you can flip through the ship database (click on the silhouette) and then assign an entry to a contact by clicking the contact and clicking 'DESIGNATE'.

All that remains really is to keep score and add difficulty levels/menu stuff - let's see how quickly I can turn that around...

Cheers,

Will
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« Reply #4 on: April 07, 2009, 01:25:42 PM »

Wow, new screenshot looks leaps and bounds more awesome than the original demo. Going to try out the latest version.
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Will Vale
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« Reply #5 on: April 07, 2009, 01:51:06 PM »

Stupidly I didn't have Photoshop with me while I was at GDC - I only got back on Monday Smiley
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« Reply #6 on: April 15, 2009, 08:39:19 AM »

I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to work, call me stupid but I cannot see how this works perhaps you could make a demo video?
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Will Vale
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« Reply #7 on: April 15, 2009, 05:24:01 PM »

Good point, and thanks for trying it out. I'll start by posting some instructions here and maybe try uploading a vid later. It is a bit of a hardcore avionics geek idea - sorry the whole thing is so dry  Undecided

"Sublight: It's more a game mechanic than a game."

Pick a difficulty level to start.

  • You are training to be the sensor operator on a warship, looking at your sensor displays. The large space on the left is your mass detector - blips will appear there and move around. Your job is find out what they are as quickly as possible.


  • To do this, click on a blip to target it. Your tracking radar will start scanning back and forth in the direction of the blip, and you'll see the radar return as a moving line in the top right display. This will give you an idea of the shape and orientation of the target.


  • Click on the ship outlines below the tracking radar to page through the different ship types. Once you've decided which one you're looking at, click 'DESIGNATE' to mark the current blip with its ship type.


  • Rinse and repeat for the remaining blips. At the end of the session you'll see how many you got right, and how quick you were on average.

HINTS/SPOILERS:

The small triangular fighters are easy to spot, and you can usually tell one before scanning it just because it's moving fast.

The long carriers are also really easy to spot, particularly as they pass your ship and reveal their profile.

Distinguishing between battleships and corvettes is hardest since they (purposefully) have similar shapes at different sizes.
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Syrion
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« Reply #8 on: April 25, 2009, 02:28:47 PM »

This seems interesting to me, but frankly, I have no idea what exactly I am shown on the screens. I understand the concept, but I just don't understand the perspective you have on those ships. Does the left screen show them from far away? Or is it rather a map and you see it from top down, with your own ship being in the center? And I still couldn't figure out which side of the ships I can see on the right screen.

I suppose figuring the mechanics out is part of the game, but I just don't get it Durr...?
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« Reply #9 on: April 26, 2009, 03:09:21 AM »

Managed 17/20 with 7 mistakes, average time 9.1s on medium.

I have to say this feels like it's been made hard in rather arbitrary ways, such as all the long straight lines in the radar display that don't seem to be connected to the shape of the target, the way the old returns take so long to fade, and the absence of anything giving context in the recognition manual, like the name of the type of ship and its usual speed. Also I missed having anything on screen that indicated what kind of time pressure I was under, or more weighty feedback from when you press the "designate" button. These things all made it take a long time to work out what the game was about. Once I had worked it out, though, I did get a sense that this could be a nice piece of a bigger submarine-style game.
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Will Vale
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« Reply #10 on: April 26, 2009, 02:52:01 PM »

I typed a reply and lost it, silly me. But in brief, thanks for trying and I think these are valid complaints. The idea was to explore "realism" but it should still be more fun than it is. I have some ideas in this direction but I was waiting for the voting to be over first.

@MisterX: Both displays are top-down 2D, you're in the centre of the left-hand display and your target is in the centre of the right-hand display. On the right-hand display you see the side of your target which is currently facing you (plus some ghosting from earlier traces).

@Pishtaco: I take your point about the long lines/slow trace. The long lines are essentially connecting the last valid return with the end of the beam - I tried it with and without these and I liked 'with' better, although I should probably revisit this.

There isn't currently any time pressure - apart from the fact that the contacts fly off the screen and don't come back, so you only get one pass on each.

As to better feedback, yes, it needs audio, button animation and a bunch of other stuff to sell the mechanic more. I also wondered about making it more gamey, so rather than a dry test, the ships are shooting at you, your ship is trying to shoot back, and until you figure out which is which your fire is ineffective. That would give some proper pressure to the gameplay.

Long term, the idea is that this is one small mechanic of a larger game, and generally you'd only be facing a few ships at once, at a slower pace. This style of play could still be an interesting high score/minigame mode though.

Will
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agj
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« Reply #11 on: April 27, 2009, 02:02:40 PM »

I like the aesthetic of this. I still don't understand how the shapes relate to the shapes of the actual ships. Do the shapes that I can select imitate how the ships look from the front, thus if you extrude them you'd get something like the actual ship? Or what? It's hard to tell.
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Will Vale
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« Reply #12 on: April 27, 2009, 02:15:21 PM »

Thanks! The shapes you select look like the entire ship seen from above, pointing left to right. The trace you see in the radar is going to be part of this shape depending on which way the real ship is pointing at the time.

It's weird - I thought the 2D thing was pretty obvious, but that's probably been the biggest hurdle, and doing this in 3D (with a 2.5D heightfield scan of a 3D shape) might actually be easier to read. Possibly because this is the cockpit compo people are expecting something more 3D?

Anyway, as a first step to proceeding with this and making it cooler, I drew a small arts for a physical screen border:



I still need to slice it up into pieces which tile properly and use these to assemble borders at different resolutions. The button has off/press/glow states, and the idea is that the initial interaction is pressing the physical button to turn the screen on. I'm not sure if the border should zoom slowly offscreen at that point.

Cheers,

Will
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