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Final Exodus


What is it?

Final Exodus is a Single Player Space RTS with first person control elements. You command a fleet across a small sector in the galaxy and kill any hostile threats, while researching new technologies and advancing your fleet.

What can you do?

Currently you can build ships either into the solar system or from a ship, you can order ships to move or attack, or goto a different solar system. You can also pilot any allied ship you wish if you feel you are better than the AI. You can research new ship building documents or upgrade your engine speed, hull armour, weapons or scout for new solar systems.

Videos?

http://forumfiles.thegamecreators.com/?i=1121606
http://forumfiles.thegamecreators.com/?i=1055558



Screenshots?








Also:

I'd like to thank EVOLVED for creating lots of useful shaders which I used 2 of in this game.

Very Old pics(for nostalgia ) ~
http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/7602/fex2og5.jpg
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7672/ship1yc3.png

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Perhaps not using links to images will gain some replies?, anyways I've now added normal mapping to everything and added a moon, which uses earths moon surface map for now, and the flat shadedness of the meshes will be worked on.

http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3880/fex3kz3.jpg

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That looks pretty good dude, however with the asteroids I feel they're too smooth and the ship isn't one of your best I must admit. Good work nevertheless.

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I agrre, the asteroids look like pebbles, the bump mapping is really nice tho!

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Yeah I realise they are too shiny, just evolved's shader seems to only take one type of dds file for the cube map layer, and reproducing that type is a bit of a pain, and the hull designs aren't supposed to be that complicated as the ships will be contructable from many other parts.

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Well I've been working hard the past few days to get some gameplay in there, aswell as effects.

I also added in tracking based weapons, as weapons come in 2 types, fixed mounted weapons such as standard lasers or mass drivers on fighters, and tracking turrets/cannons for larger ships that can't turn as fast, the cannons are made from 3 parts, the mount/base and barrel(s), so if you do a flyby you can see them gradually tracking you , I've now added in scripted weapon types, as the large ships in the pics use a railgun and 2 short range cannons(test) both fire at different rates and have diffect damages, impact effects etc etc.

I've been trying to make the target tracking system better, currently the enemys/cannons track you and lead you based on both ships velocities, projectile speed and time, however somewhere in my function it's messing up as they usually aim off slightly thus making it rather easy to kill enemys by using some basic evasive manuvers and that shall be worked on.

I've also modelled the exodus class carrier, haven't really decided on the exact class of ship it should be, as I will likely make more ships alot bigger than it, but it's fun to see them in battle .

Here's a pic of a test battle I created there were 20 exoduses and 20 fighters and shooting whatever the rnd command assigned them to and the battle is pretty cool to watch .

http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/9324/fex6gf8.jpg

I've also made it so that when ships are partially damaged they emit smoke, alot of damage and they fire, and my ship in the center is on fire (Must have been lag or something ).

And this is the aftermath of the battle,

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/8231/fex7wk5.jpg

Currently weapons can be added to ships or various things like engines as seen here,

http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/1945/fex8ze0.jpg

Though they only have temp meshes as you can see I used my basic engine mesh for it, all ships have boxes around them, these will soon change to a colour of the team, and the small diamons show activated gun batteries, and I've also added burst fire support, as the ship I'm in fires a burst of 10 every 0.05 secs and takes 0.5 secs to reload the next salvo.

Next I'll probably add missiles, and then engine effects, then add teams, then allow ships to search for targets, then allow the user to pick a target, then add the rts view so you can command the battle/issue orders etc, then I'm getting ahead of myself.

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First triple post in quite some time,

I've now added a sun and a basic nebula to the system, and also improved the target displays, so instead of the health is has a health bar, and the target boxes don't go off screen but wrap around a circle in the screen, I also added missiles, there accuracy needs to be worked on slightly, as with the turrets and ai in general, I've also finished the skin for the exodus class carrier, next I will add hyperspace travel, which will work almost like a instance of the normal space, only moving 1meter will result in 1000 meters travel outside of hyperspace, and thus makes traveling alot quicker between places, then I will make a actual galaxy and replace the stars which are currently random, to ones that reflect your current position in space.

I've also made a video as per pestering request from kentaree on irc , which shows the solar system, space flight, combat ai and stuff.

[edit] forgot the link, http://youtube.com/watch?v=PfxMj1y-r1E

And feel free to post, don't want to end up with just me talking in here :/.

[edit2] some piccies,

New scenery and hud.
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/3263/fex10de2.jpg

Missiles in action.
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/7134/fex11hm4.jpg

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After watching that vid I must say that I'm really impressed! Screens cannot do justice to it the way that vid did.

I look forward to playing this; it looks like a lot of fun.

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hehe thanks , Haven't added as much as I hoped in the last day, (too busy winning ageia compos ) I improved the nebula texture, now has more colours and looks less black, and also added earth, however it still looks very dim, so I'll be working on adding atmospheres to them soon, I've also added a solar system plan view, so you can see where way you're going and where you are in the system, and eventually see enemys and move forces.

The most important change I've added is the way the solar system is handled, as currently it's 1000000000M in diameter, which is small compared to real life, and I also made planets and the moons 1/10th the real scale, as traveling towards something for a few hours isn't that fun, and as you can imagine having space of that size is boud to cause loads of float errors and make the objects shake around all sorts, but I made all the objects shift every 2km so that the players ship never exits the bounds -2000 to 2000 on each axis, this cuts down on the error, and adds alot more code, but means I can make very big solar systems.

I also revised the games storyline, this is the whole storyline of the game, so if you don't want to spoil yourselves then don't read it.

+ Code Snippet

Game stars with you in orbit around earth, where you get some basic tutorials/training on howto control your ship, howto attack drones, and dock with stations and whatever, then you will report to your fleet by docking on the main carrier, from then you will travel into hyperspace to your first mission, you will goto a small sector close to earth, and you are to investigate a recent attack on the currently being contructed space station in that sector, and find out who was responsible, you first must find any surving ships or escape pods, once done you will find that ships of unknown design destroyed the station almost without hesitation and left once the station was destroyed, the computer logs from the black box on the station show where they went in hyperspace.

Your second mission is to go with the fleet to see where these attackers fleed to, upon arriving there, you find the local space to be totally empty, but suddenly a huge fleet of ships exit from hyperspace, with capitol ships many times the size of your own, you get an incoming transmission from the ships but are unable to understand what it says, several moments later the enemy ships open fire targetting the fleets main vessels, you are ordered to engage the enemy ships to little avail, after battling them for a while and the admiral of the fleet realises that the battle is pointless and that you have lost, you're ordered to come back to base for exacuation.

The remainder of the fleet, returns to earths orbit to begin repairs, you then have some time to trade goods for your ship and make repairs, but soon after the enemy fleet appears in earths orbit but there fleet has increaced in size dramatically, but they now have a main vessel many times the size of any in the enemy fleet, unprepared your fleet orders to defend earth no matter the cost, after a while of attacking the enemys and gradualy watching your fleet drop off the radar, the main enemy vessel turns towards earth and fires a huge beam weapon towards it, several minutes later explosions are seen around earths surface untill eventually the planet splits into many peices and a huge explosion shockwave comes across the solay system, sensors and visibility are totally down for several moments until you hear an evacuation call from one of the remaining earth vessels(exodus class carrier) once you land you travel during the sensor blackout to a remote earth base located deep within a dense nebula so the enemy won't be able to find you easily.

This base also acts as a scrapyard for decomissioned ships, and you are allowed to take one large ship and several fighters, due to earths fleet being reduced to nothing, and it's your job to find out what happened, your first job is to return to earth and recover survivors and any destroyed enemy ships to try and salvage information, while doing this you must attempt to avoid any enemy patrols should you be spotted you must jam the enemy communications and destroy them, because if they go outside of your jamming range you will likely be killed by the reinforcements.

Once done your scientists will study the enemy technology and attempt to find out why they destroyed earth and attacked you unprovoked, after a while you discover a partial enemy galaxy terretory map, however cannot translate there language, so you must seek new enemy ships to learn from and possibly steal technology from, so you pick the least guarded enemy outposts and launch an attack, once you have enmugh information from the enemy fighters about the language of the enemys you will need to find out why they have been attacking you, however information like that isn't stored in fighters or other small craft, so you must use some of the recovered enemy sensors to detect any nearby convoys, and destroy them.

Once done you will discover that it is in there races prophecy that a powerfull alien race guardian to this galaxy would one day awaken and drive out any intruders who stand in there way, and the initial message from them in the first battle was a warning to stay away from them, but since you didn't understand them they assumed you were to appose them.

However since you have now engaged them in multple attacks a peacefull solution was far from the question, so you must attempt to drive out this alien race and take back the galaxy they had destroyed from you, by clearing solar systems of enemy threats and building space stations and outposts, and when you capture enemy ships and study them, you will eventually be able to reverse engineer there technology, and create new, more advanced weapons and armours for your fleet.

Somewhere along the line when you have uncovered all the enemys galaxy map information, you will discover one planet which is marked as a location that should never be visited as any ships sent there have never returned, being very close to the center of the galaxy, sensors don't work too well there, and should you eventually go there, you will find the alien race that is far superior in technology to both your races, the moment you destroy one of there ships you will awaken them, and they will go on the offsensive by attacking all habited planets in the galaxy, hopefully you would then have enough technology and ships to stop them.

I also added engine effects, so when you turn on the main engines, the flames come out, and retract when not in use, also each map will be based on each solar system, so I won't have a vast espance inbetween stars instead you just travel between them and arrive there, this allows me to make a better game, and saves time.

and next to come is the rts mode so you can issue orders to friendly ships, and then hyperspace, so that you don't spend all day trying to get across the map, and currently that's how long it takes .

Engine effect~
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/545/fex12wb3.jpg

Nebula and the star~
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/4941/fex13bt8.jpg

Showing how far the distance between the battle and the moon is
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/7664/fex14bi5.jpg

When fully zoomed out, a plan view of the system, and the 2 x's represent the earth and moon.
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/313/fex15od5.jpg

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Just posting to say that as with all my projects I'm going to recode it, as I hit a few code organizational errors, and in it's current state adding beam weapons, more rts components would make the code very bodged, so recoding it would sort these issues out, Not to worry though, since I'm a fast coder, and I have all the media ready I could build it upto this stage fairly fast, and also I will add some new features, like the smoke trails will be made from plains that stretch/follow the missiles, rather than spawning lots of plains behind it, this will run faster, and look better, I will also add bloom somewhere along the line, and speed up the ai, as the current version if you have more than 20vs20 it starts to slowdown when there's some major combat. I will also change the way the collision checks work, currently I'm updating the collision meshes based on the ships locations, however since I want subsystems damageable that's a slow approach, so raycasting relative to the collision mesh location will speed this all up.

also means I can add ship to ship collisions, and avoidance fields so that enemy don't smash into eachother and all that.

I will make the weapons system more versatile as currently I have quite a big function to load up and handle weapon systems, also I will work on the rts system some more, taking homeworld as a good base, also ships will be able to target multiple targets, as currently carriers attacking one one ship looks a bit stupid when you're getting swarmed by enemys.

anyways that's enough talking, I've attached prettymuch the latest build until I messed it up a bit, note that I haven't yet added failsafes for systems that don't run ps 2.0, so you'll probably get an error, and it's fixed 1024x768, other than that trype the number of ships you want.

Controls are mouse for pitch/roll, a/d for yaw, q/e strafe, r/f for climb/decend, w/s accel/decel, shift = main engines, mousewheel is zoom in/out, left mouse button = guns, right mouse = missiles, space = linear brakes, alt = angular brakes.

THe controls maybe a bit confusing to some, as one of my testers said, however after around 5 mins he liked them, and so do I, can't have games that reward noobs now can we , skill FTW.

if you enable missiles, make sure you look at an enemy ship and press 'T' to target it, else the missile will just do nothing, and if you wish to switch ships, perhaps to a carrier then target it with 'T' and pres 'C', the fighters require you to be zoomed in to the max to control it, since the weapons don't turn to targets, whereas the carriers weapons do, so just target an enemy ship and the guns will do the tracking you just press fire.

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The recode is getting there, I've now fully organised all the ship parts for weapons/hulls/panels etc and now weapons are much more organised, I decided to add a new ship as a temp mesh, and also added one of geecee3's fighters , I've attached a video if you're interested, shows the destroyers with there moving parts and the engines, which are seperate objects and have various thrust values and such, and to show the rts system, which still needs work, but you can select units, tell them to move somewhere, or tell them to attack an enemy, and they will pretty much do that, I haven't added shooting to the ships yet, and I've only added in fighter AI, where they approach/attack and retreat as you would expect, and other ships will have different attack/combat styles.

The destroyer is just a temp mesh, as if any of you are into scifi you will realise why I can't enter the game with that ship in there, it's a damn sweet ship though .

http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/1916/fex27ta1.jpg

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That's looking really nice! I like the dreamlike feel that blue-purple skysphere gives. I recommend that people look at the video posted a couple of posts above (here for the lazy ones).

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Friggin nice man! I am looking forward to this one!


RF

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Bloom goddamit, why does everyone abuse it?

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That is hardly abusing it! I've never seen it look better!

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Shweet.

I just looked through all the updates since I last posted... Very nice!

What's wrong with bloom though? It's done pretty well here, and it's a darn useful shader when you're going for an over saturated look, or just want to increase the brightness your highlights.

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It looks good in this project. It does get abused though. It looks bad if everything is bright. It looks fabulous if used correctly.

I will say, however, in that last picture the ships don't look all that great. The textures are flat and too bright, and it causes an odd bloom effect. They're placeholders though, so that doesn't matter one bit. I know DCs ships will look great.

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Yea don't worry, I like to get thinngs working first, as visuals can allways be tweaked later without risk of compilation errors , anyways here's a piccie of a new ship, I call it the Hydra class battle carrier, and one dude I showed it to called it the Intergalactic vacuum cleaner :p.




I haven't finished the texture yet though just done the important parts.

Also I finished adding beam weapons today, they look really sweet in realtime so the pics don't do them much justice, and the beams increace in width/length and fade back as they fire so it's all smooth .



I will now allow the AI to fire weapons, then add collision between weapons and ships(then the fun stuff begins).

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How are you doing the lasers? I dont quite understand how to do that, but besides that, this game looks excellent. Much better than my game currently, mainly because you have amazing ship models=). I have a modeller helping me out with mine. For the lights on the ship, are you doing luminosity mapping? If so, how? I cant figure out how to make certain things glow when there are shadows cast on them. Or are you just using really dark textures with lights being very bright?

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The beam weapons themselves, are basically 2 plains at 90 degrees to eachother with culling off, and when I model and texture them I create them to how they would look when at full range, and in my game I position them at the gun barrels, and gradually stretch them out to the full distance they can reach, and then I reposition the laser to the gun each frame so it appears asif the beam is coming from the gun.

To get the windows to glow, I attempted to make a fake illumination map by making a image with just the windows on and the rest transaprent, but it doesn't seem to work with the normal mapping shader, so I just edited my normal map and made all the windows transparent, which prettymuch gets the result I want, however from some angles they get no lighting, but it looks sweet none the less.

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Thanks for the info, the 2nd part will help me a lot=D. Besides that, this is one sweet looking sci-fi game=D.

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Hehe, thanks ,

I just added double barrel weapon support, so each shot changes barrels when firing, I also added some basic AI to the larger ships, and the battle carrier turns to the side when engaging due to it's weapons setup .

I also made a small video showing the laser effects and double barrels, the cannons currently fire lasers as they look cooler :p, but once I'm done they will fire kinetic projectiles, vid is attached below. Here http://forum.thegamecreators.com/xt/xt_apollo_download.php?i=1073617

I will now add muzzle flashes, and when cannons fire the barrel will retract.

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That video... is stunning! Congratulations Dark Coder! That looks excellent!

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You think that's cool :p, I just added weapons collisions for both lasers and projectiles, and they have there own iamges and effects and all that, this isn't the finished article though, need to make it blast off debris and add some scorches to the ships eventually . here ->> http://forum.thegamecreators.com/xt/xt_apollo_download.php?i=1073914

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...If this plays as good as it looks...

Very impressive.

This is such a high end compo. I mean, nearly every entry looks ten times better than the average game to come out of here.

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I wish I had more time to resume my entry. This looks like such a fun compo I pretty much bailed after a week. I couldn't juggle everything at once and had more important projects.

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wow did you got that dream like feel ? bloom shader ?

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Looks very sweet. Only thing I didn't like in that video is that they only fire lasers at the center of the object. I assume you're going to change that eventually, with the possibility of missing the enemy altogether?

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Yes in that build they only aim for the center, and if you cannot aim there it doesn't fire, I've since changed that so the larger ships are the more innacuracy you are allowed to shoot from, and I will make it so the closer you are the more that increaces, also for lasers I could just check for a raycast and then fire, the reason I can't do that with guns is because they will track the enemy(once I add that) so a simple raycast isn't enough.

And I've now added damage to the ship hulls, and ships can also be destroyed, I also made a video showing this, and if you look closely you will see the individual parts catching alight as the ship is about to blow up. I missed the first ship explosion due to fraps cutting out :p. I will also need to add ship to ship collision checks as in that video you can see some of the friendly ships intersecting, and actually shooting eachother sometimes :p

Vid -->> http://forum.thegamecreators.com/xt/xt_apollo_download.php?i=1074303

I would have added more types of ship in that battle but I never got round to making more collision meshes for everything.

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Hey all,

I've added quite alot to the engine now, not so much visually but technically, ships now collide with other ships, they don't damage each other from collision yet, they just bump each other out of the way which you can see from the video I've attached, also I stopped ships from shooting themselves or allies, ships now blow up better, as each part catches alight gradually then BOOM!, aswell as adding fighters with ai that doesn't totally suck, and I like how fighters explode, as there is a small trail of fire then a pop .

I added a space station as you can see, and it's comprised of 2 moving parts for artificial gravity, this station is merely temp, as it's far too lowpoly for its size, but it's a good placeholder, I also began work on code for the hangar bays, currently I can detect when a ship enters a bay, and not only enters but fully enters it so that they don't vanish, or at lest not visibly.

Soon to come is designing of your own ships, which can be done via parts being welded to the hull, as well as weapons, and engines and what not, you will be able to place panels of armour around your ship to make it look like anything you want, place as many guns on it as you want, however having lots of weapons will mean you will need to start with a large hull which can support the energy requirements, and big ships are slow, and easy targets, so it's all about getting the right balance with your fleet.

I added some other things, like a small sun glare which fades when behind objects, changed the AI of everything, so fighters can kill each other, the carriers also change there y height, though don't yet z rotate themselves to point toward the enemy ship, thus wasting some guns by not allowing them to aim.

I also added anti fighter weapons as seen in the video, these are not just the same as laser with a faster fire rate, these will only track fighters so you can happily engage another carrier, and the anti fighter weapons will lock onto the nearest fighters and start blasting it out of the sky, I also added deviance to the laser rounds, as during my testing one carrier could take on around 200 fighters at once without getting killed .

I will soon add multiple maps to my universe, as well as hyper space travel, and some more RTS things, like researching/building and selection of using using a box, as clicking the mouse is rather tedious.

Also in 1hour I'm leaving for England for Christ(fictional)mas, and will be without a net connection for 3 weeks, so I made this video longer than the others as you will not be seeing any updates for a while, but I will be working on it, so once I'm back you will see a very good video and maybe a demo .

I also have some very good story line ideas in the planning to make this game fun and not click the mouse and see the outcome , so hopefully we shall see those.

Also I'm told by one of my testers that the lasers in this game rock, of course he used much more colourful language .

[edit] ok, well it seems that the apparent "(Max. 50MB)" is actually 20megs and I don't have time to uploa da new one, so pretend you saw a really awosome vid .

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Nooo!! Please compress more and post, or upload on youtube!!

well, at least for when you get back

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Back :p, I just got back home around 20mins ago(straight on the PC ) and the bad news is that I coulden't develop my game while in England due to me screwing up the PC but I still managaed to do some concept art, I will have to do some really fast coding and media creation now .

And I rather dislike YouTube now as the videos quality really sucks when uploaded, I don't see why they don't just use the uploaded videos quality rather than making it super compressed and crap, but I will post some new pics/vids etc once I've added some of these plannes features, like ship construction .

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Yo Carlos! Bloody nice work you got there ! I got a feeling you'll be owning at first place. How have you been? You haven't been on msn in ages!

Seen my entry so far?

Hope you had a good christmas,
Nick.

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Yeah, it'd be nice to have the option to leave files on you tube uncompressed, but I dont mind if it means We can see the vid. Wait! Maybe you could split the vid into two parts and post it in two posts!

Well, I can wait for a newwer vid, but I'd like to see whatever it was we all missed!

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wow thats amaizing cant wait to play it if its ready

that shader effect makes it realy nice
how do you do that btw

ive reath thise

+ Code Snippet

To get the windows to glow, I attempted to make a fake illumination map by making a image with just the windows on and the rest transaprent, but it doesn't seem to work with the normal mapping shader, so I just edited my normal map and made all the windows transparent, which prettymuch gets the result I want, however from some angles they get no lighting, but it looks sweet none the less.

but i don't understand will you plees explain some more abaut thise

your game is realy looking nice it looks a bit on eve whitch is e realy nice game

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Hey, sorry for the lack of updates, I've been working on an example game for benjamins Multisync(but you didn't hear that from me ) , and work on my game will progress as normal now, I have also designed a few more things for my game which will make it better, also I have some people to do Voice Overs for missions and/or pilots generic commands, aswell as music for the menu, ingame and battles etc.

@tommie,

The last build of my game used 2 shaders, a normal mapping shader which was applied to prettymuch all the objects other than planets( as they are prettymuch fixed in space so I can pre-render them) and a bloom shader, I use Evolved's PS 1.1 shader, as it's P1.1 alot of people will be able to support it, and also the normal mapping uses 1.1, you can get the shader from the Ultimate Shader Pack I belive but in my game I changed the rendering process from the example it comes with to only bloom certain things, like the sun/nebula and ships to minimize FPS overhead.

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thx man , and very nice game to , i realy like it
are you gona sell it when its ready ?

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Oh thank g-d! I was afraid that this game was dead! You'll still have a version for the compo, right?

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This is dead!? Noo.. Looked so good!

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Far from dead actually, and I will be spending the next 2 weeks working amazingly hard on it , as I have ALOT of free time, so I can finish this in no time, I even finished my Ageia compo entry in under a week, discluding media however as I recoded it a few times.

Anyways here's a screenshot of the Galaxy/Star Map, obviously I'm not depicting 400billion stars, as that would take a bit of time to name and all :p, so the game will take place in a local cluster of around 40 stars.

In that screenshot you can see some fleets being moved across various systems(Green cones) , aswell as ownership of systems, you can currently select ships and move them around and see the radar range of each planet, which uses a very nifty bloom trick to get the halos to all merge up without any overlapping issues, also you can see some Hyperspace routes which make ships go faster if they are travelling across them, so that makes invading other systems slower and gives the enemys/you more time to react.