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AppGameKit/AppGameKit Studio Showcase / [WIP] Dreadnought Commander

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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:38 Edited at: 5th Dec 2013 17:43
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Dreadnought Commander (Space Squadron 2)

Dreadnought Commander is a follow up to my Android game Space Squadron. It is a space simulator/strategy/RPG game in which the player takes control of a space battleship and it's crew in a sandbox and mission based environment.

Key features of the game include:

- Fully destructible ships on a component by component basis allowing for complex scenarios. Target engines, reactors, computers, the hull, tear holes, repair holes, smash ships into each other.

- Controllable crew of different classes: Commander, Crew, Engineer, Marine each with specific and important roles.

- Dock with other ships, board them, take them over. Your crew fight on the deck while your turrets blast holes broadside.

- Loads more ...

This game is being developed with handheld devices in mind.

Latest Screenies
Some particle effects


GUI updates


Latest videos
Assaulting the repair station


The space map


Testing out flight AI



******* ORIGINAL POST ********

I'm still really early in development here, but I'm in this for the long haul, and I think it'll be good for motivation and feedback to get a WIP going early. So onto the game ...

Dreadnought Commander (DreadCom) is a space battleship simulator. The player takes on the roll of a battleship commander, flying around the solar system doing the things battleship commanders do. I'm purposefully vague at this point because the mechanics should allow for many cool things ... battles, scavenging, boarding and stealing other ships, protection missions, prisoner capture etc.

The key game mechanic is a real time space flight/combat system which can be paused to perform more complex tasks. e.g. issuing orders to troops, configuring weapons, activating air locks etc. The player will fly their dreadnought in a top down style view, shooting at enemies and blowing holes in ships, then hitting pause when they need time to get strategic and issue orders. On board troops and combat marines will move around on the vessel. The ship will be alive.

I've been dabbling in this concept for years. The first real version was a game called Dreadnought Commander, where I got to the stage of basic ship destruction, weapon handling and troop control. This was made in DBP, and gives a vague idea of where I'm heading with this. Unfortunately the troop control isn't shown in this vid, but you'll get an idea of the destruction aspect.


A few years ago I made my first Android game "Space Squadron" which works on as similar principle but is much more basic. It was featured by Google as the top Strategy game for about a month, was received with mixed reviews, but there was a certain hardcore niche that loved it. So from this I'm confident the concept will do well with the same niche.



Onto the next post so I can add more images ...

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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:39 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 12:44
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In more recent times I started a hardcore version for PC in GDK. Basically I went back to the original concept seen in the video above and decided this was gonna be the big one! As often happens, life got in the way, I took another job and the project was shelved for a bit. Upon returning to it, I've decided I really need to go mobile.

In any case, I got really into the design and a lot of concepts started to come to life. Here is a shot from the ship builder tool I made showing the idea of a ship with a docking port which can extend and connect to this corridor. Perhaps docking with a space station? At this point you could move crew to and from the space station.

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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:39 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 12:47
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In this version of the game, I got as far as destructible ships and context sensitive menus. Pretty much any ship component could be clicked on and interacted with. The depth went as far as powering on and off the reactor, manually opening/closing/locking doors, setting turret pivot angles etc. The latter was cool because you'd set the limits to ensure the turret didn't shoot bits off your ship, but if the worst came to the worse and enemies troops were on board and all was lost, you could adjust the angles so the turret turned inside the smashed hull and blow them apart. Essentially, as much control as possible is the order of the day ...

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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:39 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 12:50
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So now in AppGameKit, the plan is to slightly reign in the initial ideas, and get a playable basic version onto mobile platforms. From there I'll be able to expand functionality while also keeping it intuitive and easy(ish) to play.

So what have I done so far on this mobile version? Well firstly I've developed a few ugly bug functional tools. This component editor allows me to currently setup collision information, and will eventually incorporate animation features and stats like durability etc. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for me to make loads of different ship components and get them in the game fast.

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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:39 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 12:54
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With the components made and in their own file format, I could then work on a ship hull editor. This is essentially just a component placement editor which allows me to rapidly create many different ships from the various prefabs. It also allows me to define which bits are connected to with other bits, which parts are walkable, which parts are roofing (so they can be removed so you can see inside the ship).

This is just a very quick crappy looking ship made from crappy placeholder components while I work on the game. It is missing many key things like roofing, control computers, captains chair, turrets, airlock doors etc.

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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:39 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 12:58
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This shot gives you a better idea of how I'm building the ships.

Top left: These are the components beneath the walkable areas. So these will be bits like girders, maybe fuel tanks etc. I just have a simple skeleton going on here.

Top right: This is with the walkable tile layer place on top. These parts are the parts the crew inside the ship is free to walk over.

Bottom left: This is with walls and a few components like jets and the main reactor added. No roofing yet!

Bottom right: This is a glimpse at the component connection tool. Here we can see a wall is selected and I've defined it's connected to the two adjacent walls and the floor till. If all these of those items are destroyed, the wall will breakaway or be destroyed. It's very simple, but it's pivotal to allowing holes to be torn in ships without leaving random floating sections alive with aren't connected to anything!

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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 12:40 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 13:09
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Ooops. Accidental additional post.
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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 13:08 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 13:09
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I'm still in the very early stages in terms of AppGameKit development. So far I've just setup systems so I can import my file formats, tested structure connections (so make sure bits are removed correctly based on damage), and also done performance testing.

This scene contains 13 of my test ships, each with around 60 component models, still running at 30fps on my Asus Transformer. So I'm happy with that, as I intend to setup some LOD/culling/etc. techniques for when you zoom out.

Also this screenshot gives a vague idea of ship destruction. It's a leap of imagination for someone new to the idea to think how cool this would be, but when there are ships 5 times this size, with skeletal structures exposed, all ravaged, and crew trying to fix them, these battle scars will tell the tales! Imagine ghostly dead hulks floating through space, or narrowly surviving defeat with your bridge still connected to the rest of the ship by one tiny girder.

The central reactor will always be the main component. When that's destroyed, the whole ship, no matter how big, goes boom! Until then you can smash ships into each other and blow chunks out of them.

There are so many ideas to talk about, from crew classes, repairing ships, scavenging for components, marine class troops that fly through space with jet packs to board enemy ships through hull breaches, how I'm going to deal with the concept of depressurising, blah blah. Too much to discuss right now, so I'll leave it here and just tackle each bit as and when I get to it.



More soon hopefully!

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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 13:19 Edited at: 23rd Sep 2013 13:19
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Looks interesting. The movie was pretty cool

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baxslash
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 14:08
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I remember your old thread for this, it's a great concept. Keep up the good work! Looking forward to seeing how this works out in AppGameKit

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The Zoq2
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 15:40
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This seems like a really interesting project, and something that I would love to play.

Say ONE stupid thing and it ends up as a forum signature forever. - Neuro Fuzzy
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 22:49
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Thanks for the interest gents.

Today I got a basic space backdrop and scrolling star field effect working, plus a control pad for controlling the ship. I'm going for an asteroids style approach to this, so there will be some challenge to flying in a straight line. I think I'll probably provide a "simulation" mode in the game, where the ship moves and fires in a physically accurate way, and then an "arcade" style approach which is easier to just pick up and run with.

With the ship moving and controllable now, I think I'll go back to the destruction/crashing side of things and put the mechanics in to allow ships to crash into each other. More tomorrow!
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Chris Tate
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2013 23:19
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Wow looks interesting straight off the bat. It would be fun to play something like this on my mobile. I love a creative game of creativity.

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Matty H
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Posted: 24th Sep 2013 00:14
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Really glad this is here and making good progress. I think it's good you scaled down your plans for the mobile version. This looks like it will work really well with touch screens, you could make the adjustments pretty quick and effortless with the right implementation.

Would you consider slowing time instead of stopping it, I mean really slow so thing are just about moving, I think that might keep the intensity going. GTAV does it when you switch weapons, with a full screen effect, works pretty well.

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Posted: 24th Sep 2013 00:23
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Quote: "Would you consider slowing time instead of stopping it, I mean really slow so thing are just about moving, I think that might keep the intensity going. GTAV does it when you switch weapons, with a full screen effect, works pretty well."


That's not a bad idea mate. It'd simulate the speed with which you could give vocal orders in a way, while keeping the tension up like you said. I've always liked slow motion stuff in games, Max Payne being the first awesome example I can think of.

Like Space Squadron, the concept is kind of an RPG based around you. So you will be the captain, and a bit rougelike when you die, you die. So while you're in command of a crew, there's nothing to stop you commandeering another ship, or hiding out on a space station, or whatever. Just depends which mechanics I actually put in place. Not sure of depth yet, but the pausing is to facilitate that depth while basing it all around your character.

Slow motion is definitely one to explore mate. Good shout.
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Posted: 24th Sep 2013 20:05 Edited at: 24th Sep 2013 20:06
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I was hoping to have some cool stuff done today, but as usual I was slowed down by a technical problem while I worked on ship to ship collision.

My ships have a radius which is used for the first stage of collision. When the two ships weren't touching, I got a steady 1500 FPS. Upon moving their radius together, the collision system then starts to check on a component level. It checks every component in a ship against every component in the other ship, using a basic collision radius approach again. This plunged to 400 fps. Even though that's obviously a good frame rate, I wasn't willing to take such a huge hit just because bits and bobs were getting vaguely close to colliding.

It turns out it was just the iterations rather than any slow code. Initially it was 1000 components (most of which didn't exist) vs 1000 components, made for 1 million iterations with nothing really happening. Stupid! So firstly I rewrote some code so empty component positions weren't checked, but that's still 70x70 (5000) box then radius checks, which is just too much.

I realised this problem would be ridiculous when I have huge ships with many hundreds of components and strange shapes so their collision sphere has a huge radius. So in the end I started working on a grouping system whereby components are automatically grouped at load time into preset group sizes and groups can then be box/radius checked. This got the FPS up to 1000+ again when ships get close to each other.

Experimenting with group sizes showed that smaller groups wasn't necessarily better, and a group side between 10 and 20 components seems to be best. In any case, technical challenge solved, FPS retained (woohoo) and hopefully I can do the final step of precise component collision and the start of destruction tomorrow.

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MikeMax
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Posted: 26th Sep 2013 07:02
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very cool project ! i love it !

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Posted: 26th Sep 2013 14:35 Edited at: 26th Sep 2013 14:37
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Cheers Mike.

Here's a look at the work so far on the destructible ships. I made a new hull in the ship editor and have also added durability to each component. I've got some decent collision detection in there and some basic physics (momentum transference etc) which I want to improve. I think it already shows the potential. Crashing into other ships will be both highly dangerous and also a good weapon when things are looking really desperate.

The reactor is the main component of any ship, so when that gets destroyed the whole ship blows up with a huge explosion (eventually!)

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baxslash
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Posted: 26th Sep 2013 15:44
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Nice!

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Posted: 26th Sep 2013 21:14
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Cheers baxslash.

Turns out my torque force simulation (ships rotating after collision) wasn't working properly because of a missing # off one of my variables. Hint hint option explicit thread.

I made a mini space station ship this afternoon with weak 'arms' which are easy to smash off. I'm starting to see potential for special heavy assault ships with mega armour that can just smash through weak vessels. They'd scare the hell out of you!

Onto something new tomorrow. There are so many options but I think I'm going to start work on the crew control and get some placeholder cube humans navigating the deck.
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Posted: 27th Sep 2013 02:27
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Nice to see you back and making more game.

This looks really good.

Is the game space squadron that you mentioned in your first post?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hangfire.spacesquadron

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Posted: 27th Sep 2013 10:09
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Yep, that's the one. I may brand this as Space Squadron 2: Dreadnought Commander. Not sure yet.
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baxslash
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Posted: 27th Sep 2013 11:23
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Quote: "I'm starting to see potential for special heavy assault ships with mega armour that can just smash through weak vessels. They'd scare the hell out of you!"

That would be cool as long as the lighter ships can move and turn quicker to avoid them I think, otherwise it's an unfair advantage.

Can't wait to try this

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Posted: 27th Sep 2013 13:39 Edited at: 27th Sep 2013 13:40
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You're right mate. Balancing all of this will be an interesting challenge. I'd imagine they'll more likely be heavy assault ships with stupid turning circles which you'd just have to spend ages hacking away at while they fly towards your space station.

Now I think about it, destroying them would be hard, so they'd make an ideal candidate for a sabotage mission. Blast them until you damage the armour enough to breach the hull, then fly some space marines with jet packs into the breach and fight in the corridors to plant C4 at their reactor. So much potential!

This morning I've started the navigation for troops. I'm going with a simple grid based approach and some sort of A* algoritm.

In the screenie I have my spindly space station model. When I switch to 'Walkable' mode I can click grid squares as walkable or not. I then link each grid square to a 'walk on' component, which when destroyed means that grid square is no longer walkable. It then automatically does ray casting to figure out which tiles are linked.

I'll need to do ray casting on the fly in the game to figure out when tiles are connected (by the destruction of walls) or if the hull of some other ship or other object is blocking a path. So I'm happy to keep tile links dynamic rather than pre-calculated and I'll have to get clever to make all this ray casting efficient and just done when necessary.

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Posted: 27th Sep 2013 20:11 Edited at: 27th Sep 2013 20:11
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I got my walkable node network successfully imported into the game and translated properly with the rotated ships. I then decided to have a break from coding and made a basic character. This chap is 290 polys, and the small pics are about as close as you'll ever get to him, so I reckon the detail level is about right for mobile devices. He's rendered in flat shading here so will look better smooth shaded anyway.

He is individual meshes, and I'll probably make my own animation system using the individual meshes. This will allow me to get around the lack of animation and have full control over the limb, as well as perhaps make characters more customisable. Considering the view distance the individual limbs shouldn't make any real difference.

I'm going to make one more mega low LOD level for further view distances and then at a certain range some sort of GUI based 2D 'blob' will represent the crew, colour coordinated to function/class.

The look will be very armoured/storm trooperish anyway, so blocky heads shouldn't be an issue. The reasoning is that in the Dreadcom universe space travel is still pretty new so space suits are necessary and with the ever present threat of hull breaches, helmets stay on. It simplifies everything for me too.

I'll post up another screenie once skinned and in the game, but I'll leave the animation for another day and just use him unanimated to work on the crew control code.

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Fallout
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Posted: 28th Sep 2013 02:22 Edited at: 28th Sep 2013 02:23
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Had another bash. Got the polys down to 234 and also rounded off limbs and added some armour pads so they look better when rotated. Also fixed the normals so it looks good smooth shaded.

I'll probably do a bunch of variations but I'm happy with this as a base. Couldn't imagine getting it any lower. I didn't use any primitives and placed every vertex/face by hand (love milkshape). I'll texture it tomorrow so it makes more sense visually.

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Posted: 28th Sep 2013 17:16 Edited at: 28th Sep 2013 17:16
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Textured. I'm really pleased with it for 234 polys. Think I need to pinch the verts in around the fists but apart from that I'm chuffed! Now back to path finding shananigans.

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Posted: 29th Sep 2013 14:34 Edited at: 29th Sep 2013 14:34
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Oh hi good looking! This chap is 68 polys and is the super low LOD version.

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Posted: 29th Sep 2013 14:35 Edited at: 29th Sep 2013 14:59
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What the LODs look like on board. Top screenie is closest view distance. I think the main model looks good from this distance. Second shot is when LOD switching takes place.



Edit: Interestingly makes zero difference to frame rate. Not even 1 FPS when at 455FPS zoomed in. No idea what's going on there. I'd have thought 4800 few rendered polys would've made 1 FPS difference. Perhaps something to do with the lack of culling in V1. Who knows?!

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Ancient Lady
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Posted: 29th Sep 2013 17:12
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Quote: "Not even 1 FPS when at 455FPS zoomed in."

V108+ does not do 3D culling yet. That is expected in V2.

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Hi AL. Yep, I know that from the thread in Product Chat, but these characters are set to invisible, so not even drawn, yet no FPS difference. Very bizarre!

So I just did a little test and it looks like they just hardly cause any overhead away. 20,000 polys drawn vs 0 made only 3 FPS difference on my Asus Transformer. Incredible! So perhaps LODing is a complete waste of time as far as my characters are concerned.
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Matty H
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Posted: 29th Sep 2013 19:25
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I think you are a victim of your own conservativeness

Your high poly model is 234 polys This is still a really small amount for a player model, probably smaller than most games furthest lod.

But you have the system in place now and when the hardware is under more stress later in development I'm sure it will help and allow many more characters on screen at once.

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Yeah, I think you're right Matty. I'd rather be a victim of conservativeness and a high frame rate than a low frame rate. Once I've got my animation system working I'll see how many characters I can get on screen. Perhaps I'll be able to have more crew than I thought I would.
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Posted: 1st Oct 2013 12:24 Edited at: 1st Oct 2013 12:25
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So I've made a really simple animation program for the character. Quick, dirty, but easy enough to use. Here is a simple walk animation. It outputs angles and limb positions as key frames but in the game itself I'll actually interpolate all the between frames in advance for speed, so animation should have little overhead.



Good old codec squishing my aspect ratio!
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MikeMax
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Posted: 1st Oct 2013 18:44
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Amazing work Fallout ! i can't wait to see the final result !

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Posted: 2nd Oct 2013 20:42 Edited at: 2nd Oct 2013 20:42
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Thanks Mike. It's progressing!

I've got the animation system working, but can't test it until I have characters that can navigate. I do have a basic animation for them floating off into space when their tile gets destroyed though.

I spent pretty much all of today wrestling with A*. It literally has been kicking me in the jewels since lunchtime. For anyone familiar with A*, I had some hideous bug in my open/closed list system which meant when I removed the 'current' square from the open list, I broken the open list. In the end I had to implement all manner of debugging systems with many minutes of watching spheres appear in different colours until I could see what was going wrong.

Anyway, A* is done and routes can be plotted on a ship, though haven't decided how troops will walk/fly between ships yet. Here's proof!!! Just because it took me so much effort and I feel compelling to document my eye ball aching success.

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kamac
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2013 01:07
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Amazing work. Really. I am impressed.

You probably deserve some badge.

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Posted: 3rd Oct 2013 13:03 Edited at: 3rd Oct 2013 13:04
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Cheers Kamac. I have some badges already. Not sure if I qualify for another unless I do something really nice for the community like bake everyone a cake. Maybe there should be a badge for that?

Ok, more progress. This vid shows the following:

1. LOD. Switches to a NODE when really far away to make it easier to see what the crew are doing.
2. Path finding using A*
3. New animation system with blending
4. Crew ejection animation for when the piece of the ship they're on is destroyed.

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Ancient Lady
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2013 16:10
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Extremely cool!

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Ancient Lady
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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2013 21:07
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I agree

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Chris Tate
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Posted: 8th Oct 2013 21:22
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Yep!

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Fallout
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Thanks you lot!

Minor update with no screenies .. Boooooo. I have the marine class crew man in now, and have been working on the targeting, and bullets and all the collision and logic that involves. There's all the fun of making sure they only shoot when they have LOS, not shooting their own team, automatically selecting targets, refire rates and reloading and all that gubbins. All while trying to keep it fast for mobile and many units on many ships.

Hopefully have another vid by the end of the week.
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Fallout
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Posted: 10th Oct 2013 15:36
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Ok, here's some more cool stuff ...

Here you can see the marine class. They'll be your standard combat unit. Not sure what I'll do about different weapons etc yet.

This vid also gives you an idea about how raiding may work. Normal ship to ship movement would involve docking with a ship. You'll probably be able to force dock with enemy ships after you've disabled them, or perhaps with some tractor beam or something. I've not decided yet, but if you've smashed into them and you're close enough, a jump icon will appear. Tapping this allows your marine to jump onto the enemy ship and cause some carnage. Still early days visually.

This will also be a mechanism to take over ships. The general principle the game will have is the commander is you, and the ship he controls is your ship. So jumping/walking him onto another ship and logging into the main control panel will give you ownership of that vessel. So if you see a ship you like, storm it with your marines and log into the computer and it yours.

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Wilf
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Posted: 10th Oct 2013 21:04
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Ridiculously, stupendously good stuff.
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Fallout
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Posted: 11th Oct 2013 14:28
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haha. Thanks Wilf.

Well I started work on the Engineer class today, and it was surprisingly straight forward to make. The engineer simply repairs stuff. In this vid repair speed is VASTLY accelerated. I want damage to your ship to be a big deal, so consider having to leave an engineer in a corner of a ship for maybe 5 minutes to repair a few panels.

I've also added some sound effects for crashing, guns, troop orders etc. Troop responses will be able to be switched off in the menu, because I know they can get tiresome.

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Fallout
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Posted: 11th Oct 2013 19:08 Edited at: 11th Oct 2013 19:11
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Managed to also get the Commander unit done today. Blinging gold armour. He is equipped with a pistol which is about half as effective as the marine unit, though he'll have way more health. This guy is basically you!

I've also added a "commander's chair" component, which only commanders can sit in. Sitting in this chair effectively assumes control of the ship. It's like logging in. So parking your backside in one of these on someone else's bridge will make that the ship you're controlling.

I think there will be other benefits to leaving the commander in the chair. Some sort of speed/stat bonuses, or some such, but of course you can do what you want with him. You can even fight on the front line if you're brave.

Chairs will be class specific. So only the commander can sit in the commanders chair, and only crew (the grey ones) will be able to sit in the navigation chair (required for the ship to move) and the gunners chairs (required for turrets to fire, or at least be automated). So all crew have a very distinct purpose and high value.

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Fallout
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Posted: 11th Oct 2013 20:03
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Ahh, what the hell. I just made another vid with the Commander in. Why not?

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Ancient Lady
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Posted: 11th Oct 2013 20:12
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Cool.

What do you use to get the videos?

Cheers,
Ancient Lady
AGK Community Tester and AppGameKit Master
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Fallout
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Posted: 12th Oct 2013 00:04
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Thanks AL. I use Fraps. Seems to work very well with AGK.
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Fallout
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Posted: 15th Oct 2013 14:58
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Ok, the mechanisms are all coming together now. I need to put more work into this as it doesn't take into account getting smashed into or shot when docking is in process, but it's mostly there.

This vid demonstrates a few things. I have an icon msg system which shows msgs in the top left of the screen to give you pointers on what to do. It says things like you need to log in, and you need a pilot to control the ship etc. Some are pressable buttons.

When you get your docking port within range of another friendly or disabled ship, you can press the docking button. The ships are automatically positioned and the docking port extends. You can then transfer troops between ships.

Your commander can sit in the commander's chair of the other ship, logging in and this then becomes your ship. All you need then is a pilot (which could be your commander if you're short on crew!) to sit in the navigation seat (green one) and you can control the ship.

This is the way in which you'll take over enemy ships as well as your own ship at the start of the game. In the tutorial mission I intend the player to start on a space station, with the ship docked to it and the crew already on board. You then walk your commander on as part of the tutorial, put your pilot in place and it continues.

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