[devlog] Free Camera (and vacations)

EsKa

Snap1576Hey there !

So far 1.05 seems to hit the mark with no major bug report and no particular issue needing an urgent fix. It looks like I can take a few days off without worrying about critical bugs, which is great as I will be away until early August. I will still answer emails but anything game, website or paypal related (including donation processing) will have to wait until I am back. Oh also, many thanks to joeyeti on the forum for contributing to the wiki manual.

Let’s get back to the game 🙂

Free Camera

I am currently implementing some changes to how the camera is handled. Basically I am implementing a “free camera” similar to any RTS where you can move around, select units and give them orders. In more technical terms I am getting rid of the “playership” variable.

A video should speak much better than me here so here we go :

While you can still control a single ship manually, it is now possible to move the camera around freely. To that effect, the “change ship”, and the “center camera on target” commands will become toggles between free camera and control/follow. The “reset camera” command will likely disappear. As you can see in the video, it is possible to move across sectors using the free camera. It’s not yet smooth and it lacks some UI icons to tell you about it, but it’s coming soon.

Contrary to what it seems, it’s a fairly big change code wise. Until now, a lot of the code has been articulated around this “playership” variable, every menu displaying foes and friends use it, not mentioning all the basic ship-to-object interactions. Getting it perfectly right with all the commands and edge cases involved will likely take a few releases, but I am hopeful it will be a fairly quick process.

Miscellaneous

Thanks to paul’s new faction with its unarmed transport ships, I managed to catch a bug that causes such kind of ship to “go zombie” (their AI module crashes and they do nothing until destroyed, basically) when under attack. So, and that’s both a bug fix and a feature, unarmed ships (no weapon slots or no weapon equipped) will simply continue as usual when under attack. They will still call for help and try to jump away but they won’t enter the “combat” module. I will probably get back to it later and add some form of evasive maneuver just for show, but all in all, either an unarmed ship is faster than the attacker and can escape, either it’s not and will get destroyed anyway.

The changes to the camera system also allowed me to check parts of the code I don’t usually visit that often. So, don’t expect that clearing your bounty at a pirate base will repair your hull for free anymore, that was a blatant copy&paste abuse :). I also fixed a bunch of cases where the station you’re trading with would interact with the “playership” instead of the ship trading with said station (mostly repairs and bounty handling).

There are a few other small changes, but nothing important, getting the new camera control scheme is the current priority. Once I am done with that, I will fully integrate the colony management / building / razing part of the game. After that I will add new hull properties: damage absorption rates vs damage types, repair costs, optional regeneration and all that jazz. As usual, it will be fully moddable. I will also likely rework the empire manager menu into more manageable and useful chunks.

I plan for a major 1.1 release in September including all of the above, and hopefully a bit more (new weapon effects/behaviors, defensive platforms, multi-class ships).

Anyway, that’s all for now. I know it was shorter than usual, but after the last few months of crunch-time, I really needed to take a break. Don’t worry, I will resume work as soon as I get back 🙂

Cheers,
EsKa.

4 thoughts on “[devlog] Free Camera (and vacations)”

  2. Huh, I was wondering why my cargo ships were dieing to pirates a lot, despite being so fast. I never actually noticed they were freezing up.

    Removing the piloted ship thing sounds nice. Makes it more like an empire management and less like an RPG. Being able to move the camera to an asset without taking control of it would be good though if that isn’t planned (sounds like you mean being able to either have free camera or taking control of an asset directly). Sometimes you want to jump over to see what something is doing without actually controlling it, like in the case of a constructor where controlling it stops construction (although removal of playership may fix that issue too).

    Actually, having hotkeys for viewing and selecting ships would be great. Control groups where one press selects them, two presses centers on them (or the first in the group if they aren’t all together).

  3. I am back !

    That’s more or less what I propose :

    key 1 : Switch between “control ship” and “exit to RTS camera”

    key 2 : Switch between “center camera on selected object” and “exit to RTS camera”

    And, yes I really should implement the double “click” on keyboard. It’s pretty standard to press two times a number to center on the associated group. Will do. Double mouse click wouldn’t go amiss either for other purposes.

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