Oops, I haven’t updated the website as much as I should, sorry about that, I am helping relatives moving house. And to be honest most of the improvements I am currently making are under the hood or bug fixing. Anyway, here’s what has been achieved last week.
Enjoy ! 🙂
Another development update, with screenshots. A lot has been done this week, a map editor, a very basic system where factions battle each other, a (better) sector map and a hell lot of bug fixes.
Enjoy ! 🙂
As promised, here is an article regarding the navigation system that will be used in Unending Galaxy. This is a design article, so as usual with such articles, not all the features listed here are already implemented, and some things may very well change during development.
Also, screenshot of a messy battle, just to say that the inter-faction warfare is making progress.
Enjoy ! 🙂
Regular updates also mean (more than usual) somewhat boring updates from time to time too. But, fear not ! There’s two screenshots, with one featuring a few ships of the third main race. Next article should be more interesting as it will be a design document about how the navigation across the universe will work. Things will be fairly different from the gate / jumpdrive system of the X games.
Enjoy ! 🙂
Did a long review of the display engine. It’s multi-threaded now (that doesn’t mean it will handle SLI), It manages to keep a high FPS even with hundreds of shots and ships at the same location. Ships can rotate now and shields are shown when hit or charging, leading the way to further “special” effects like explosions. I also fixed an annoying and hard to catch bug that was causing the camera to stutter a bit. The game also handle any resolution I can throw at it (was locked in 1:1 aspect ratio before).
In more miscellaneous changes: I added a lot of new settings to weapons (ability to bypass shields, beam colors, pass through ships and so on) and fixed some related bugs. Sectors with trade stations get a few police/patrol fighters and cruisers patrolling around. Attacked ships call local police / military forces to the rescue. It seems to have put a relatively harmless bug to the light, where ships from the same faction may attack each other if one get hit with a missile by accident.
And last but not least I added preliminary code for the Diplomacy system. Factions can determine how much they like / hate each other and the player according to various parameters. Next step is for them to use this system to declare war / alliances. Then it will be the turn of the the military side of things. I hope to achieve most of it before the end of this week.
Here is another design document regarding Unending Galaxy. I will explain how the diplomacy between the different factions (including the player) will work. As usual, this is not a definitive document, details may change, but the main ideas and concepts will stay more or less the same.
Enjoy ! 🙂
As promised, I have published two in-game videos of Unending Galaxy. Do not forget that this is pre-alpha footage (ships will rotate correctly and won’t stack once I am done reviewing my display engine). Also, the videos are a bit choppy, my hard drive seems to be too slow for recording stuff.
Anyway, enjoy ! 🙂