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.
Made a bug fixing pass over the whole code. There’s probably more to be found, but I have killed the most annoying ones. I am also more or less done with the preliminary Faction Station Building AI. Factions are now perfectly able to plant any kind of factory and then plant the one producing the intermediate wares. It was less of a challenge than I initially thought to be honest (do not ask me why X3 wasn’t able to do the same, I have no idea). The current system ain’t perfect and rely a bit too much on randomization, but it’s functional and good enough for the test version.
Now that’s done, I will probably explore the inter faction diplomacy, war and military. A design post will follow soon on that subject.
I will try, from now on, to post more or less regular development updates in addition to the other more design oriented articles. This one is regarding my current work on the Faction AI and the galaxy map. As usual, feel free to comment.
Enjoy ! 🙂
I am not going to tell you that I made a lot of progress on Unending Galaxy the last two weeks, because it would be a lie, feel free to blame my friends. But I am back on tracks now. I have a more or less functional sector and universe map, I implemented my pathfinder, and most of what I have been talking about in the previous articles is now in place.
Also, I added some pages regarding UG to my wiki. The most complete part being the one about the Core faction. Needless to say, don’t take anything written there for something definitive. I am also hoping to release an in-game video in a few weeks.
Anyway, Happy New Year !
Here is another development post regarding my Unending Galaxy project that will mostly focus on Faction related mechanics and on the recent additions to the AI. Enjoy!
OUTDATED POST PLEASE REFER TO THIS ARTICLE INSTEAD
So, as you may know, I have been working on a new project the past few weeks. This is a top down space exploration, trading and combat game, called Unending Galaxy (work in progress title). I have built an early 7Day Prototype in December, and I am now working on improving it [it will be for PC/Windows and probably other platforms later on]