  Space combat prototype - phase 3 | 
Posted - 3/21/2006 11:45:15 AM | I've made a lot of progress on the combat prototype this week end, and that's a Good Thing (tm), even if it wasn't as relaxing as it was supposed to be. I tested the space station interior with Shawn in network. Despite being a bit late and having difficulties with DLL hell, everything worked fine. For the first time, Shawn was able to "visit" his space station from the inside, with ships physics and collisions. I also showed him how the docking procedure will look like, and so far we haven't spotted any problem. It also seriously helped to "feel" the scale of the station, and how some sections are a bit too small even for a small ship to pass.
I've redesigned a large part of the code. I've introduced the concept of "ship parts" ( which was missing before ), and the ability to attach thrusters, hardpoints and weapons to a specific ship part. I've also recoded the breaking part functionnality and the collision bodies.
A lot of people have been working on their parts, too. Juan is advancing quite well in the hunter texturing, and today i placed it into the game (note: not the prototype) and adjusted the shaders to give it a nicer look; see screenshot underneath. John also sent the more or less final version for the sound fx and the quality is really good for mono sounds. Koshime's still making some fantastic sketches, and Russell's busy on the storyline.
Despite this, there is still a lot to do. I might get the "gameplay" done this week, but i'll probably need more time to add the HUD, 3D sound, particle / shaders effects, balancing, etc.. which means it's now quite likely that it'll get delayed again by a week.
A side view:
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| Space combat prototype - phase 2 | |
Posted - 3/16/2006 4:06:23 PM | The combat prototype is advancing well. Before i continue on more technical things as usual, let's see who's been doing what:
- Shawn is working on the space station interior. He has started to model the station with the design i showed in my last dev journal post. However, as he's a real artist ( unlike me ), he made a very clean and nicely done mesh. With the latest update today, i've been playing with physics and collisions in it, adjusted some controls / thrusters so that ships can dock easily, etc.. The station is made of half a hundred "alcoves" ( for the lack of a better word ). An alcove corresponds to a landing volume reserved for a single ship. There are many alcoves of different sizes all over the station. In order to dock, a ship will have to fly through the station, align itself on top of the alcove, and then "land" by using the vertical thruster. The station will be missing from the space combat prototype.
- Starbrow is working on a simple H.U.D.: status bars / speed, radar, chat / info box, etc..
- JoeB is adding details to his battleship, which will be included in the prototype. He'll also work on a simple laser mine.
- Kaboom22 is finishing his interceptor. mostly a few smoothing problems remaining. Will be included in the prototype.
- A few other people are working on misc. ships. Might or not get included in the prototype depending on the state / quality of the results.
- Oski is working on his battle song, and might try to get another one done.
- Two other people ( John and Marc ) have stated that they were interested in working on Infinity - as a test, i gave them a few tasks to complete for the prototype, respectively: sound effects, and particle effects.
- And Koshime is still producing a lot of concept art, not just for the prototype.
Programming update:
- added and adjusted ship-specific physics parameters
- server is currently disabled ( while testing some code )
- fixed bugs in collisions / contact points
- integrated modular objects, that can break ( like Kaboom's interceptor, can loose its wings )
- added thrusters and modified physics to make use of them instead of applying forces directly. Thrusters can also be attached to a ship module, so that when a ship looses its wing, the thrusters are no longer acting on the ship.
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| ASEToBin model viewer and space station interior d | |
Posted - 3/10/2006 11:49:46 AM | In the past days i've been working on a new update for the ASE To Bin model viewer. You can find all the details in this thread:
http://fl-tw.com/InfinityForums/viewtopic.php?t=594
Note that support for Maya or Blender is still experimental ( as a few regulars have discovered ). Mostly due to the shaky nature of the plugins in these softwares ( nothing i can really fix ).
In other news, i've been discussing with Shawn about the design for the space station interiors. Shawn had made some early work on that, but honnestly i wasn't happy with it. It was looking modern, not futuristic. So i launched 3ds max and used my ( very ) basic modelling skills to show off my vision of the space station interior design. I ended up with these:
Camera inside the top room, looking down ( notice the size of JoeB's frigates in it ):
The main room (top):
What it might look like when a ship is docked ( looking up ):
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| Space combat prototype - phase 1 | |
Posted - 3/7/2006 4:11:16 PM | Time for an update.. regulars who follow my progress on irc or on the website won't learn anything new, but for the others..
Evolutional from gd.net, thanks to him, has been kind enough to let me know that a small article has been published in PCZone about Infinity. Shawn will be happy to see his station published in a magazine.. :)
The main news is the development of a space combat prototype. Unlike my previous prototypes, this one will be public, which means that it'll be open to anybody who's got the time ( rendez-vous on irc, no date fixed yet ) and the system requirements to run it. As it's a prototype, do not expect anything really advanced: the goal is to test a few sub-systems ( networking, physics, collisions, combat gameplay, etc.. ) but it won't be running all the nice graphics & shaders that i've developped in the past ( most of the models won't even be textured ), and the.. gameplay.. will be pretty basic ( hopefully already fun ... ? ).
My goal is to make the combat gameplay similar to the old arcade games, like XWing. It'll be mission based, PvP ( two teams, two battleships separated by a mine field ) and the area will be quite small ( while Infinity will be completely open ended ). Still that'll be very helpful to test the first components and the networking code.
All the details can be found in that thread.
So, where am i at, right now ? The networking code is running with physics, the playfield is created with placeholders, i've setup the basic control as well as 3 views ( internal, close external, far external ), and controls ( with side thrusters ), the collisions, the lasers ( ala Star wars ), the hitpoints/damage systems for ships and mines, and finally the A.I. targetting for the mines ( ships will be player controlled so they won't need A.I. ).
I'm now starting to implement turrets and hardpoints. It looks like i've hit a design problem in my system which will force me to rewrite a whole bunch of code. Fortunately, this code is only a few days old, so it's not like i'll have to rewrite thousands of lines. The problem is to handle objects that are attached ( mounted ) to other objects in network.
In the coming week, i'm planning to do these ( in rough order ):
- turrets/hardpoints
- handling player disconnections
- destructions of entities ( explosions of mines and ships )
- victory/defeat conditions
- basic H.U.D.
And then, polishing everything, adding effects ( maybe a couple shaders, a few textures, a planet and the starfield in the background ? ), enhancing the gameplay features and.. testing, testing, a lot.
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| A small rant.. | |
Posted - 3/4/2006 9:01:10 AM | I just bought a new external USB hard drive, a 250 GB Western Digital. It was quite a surprise when i powered it on, to see it glowing with flashy blue neon lights everywhere (i should have noticed on the box when i bought it, but i was quite in a hurry..). Not only it consumes power for something that is completely useless , but it also makes my room look like a christmas tree.. LEDs on the keyboard, on the mouse, on the screen, and now on the hard drive ? What's next ?
Seriously, when i wake up at night and cross the room, it looks surreal..
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| A thousand ships | |
Posted - 3/2/2006 8:37:37 AM | I've started to work on a combat gameplay prototype. This prototype should hopefully be done in the coming weeks ( hopefully mid-March ) and its primary purpose will be to test:
- the networking module with up to 25 players in the same battle
- the 3D engine with level-of-detail
- different possible configurations for controls ( keyboard + mouse )
- the combat gameplay mechanics
Today, i've loaded JoeB's ship 1000 times. Initially the framerate was pretty bad ( 15 fps ), but i discovered that the gears of the ship counted for 32 independant objects ( so that they can be animated later ). "In Flight", the gears are invisible since retracted into the hull, so i removed them from the model and reexported it as a single object, and got a framerate for around 125 fps. The model is 7200 triangles, which means the scene weights a total of 7.2 MTris. Thanks to LOD, the per-frame polycount is closer to half a million polys.
Of course, with "only" 25 ships, the framerate skyrockets ( around 500 fps ). It's not even funny.
A basic video of the 1000 ships scene can be found here:
1000 light frigates
I've also started to optimize the planet's heightmap / noise generator and the procedural algorithms. They make heavily use of Perlin noise. I cannot really improve it since i'm already using an optimized version of the noise. However, i've started to implement a cache for the noise functions, and i'm expecting improvements in the 10x to 50x range. More on that later.
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