Friday 30 November 2012

2012 IOTY Awards



The 2012 Indie of the Year Awards have started over at IndieDB, where you can support the developers by voting for your favourite games and upcoming projects!

Tuesday 13 November 2012

Ship Customisation

I've made some improvements to the ship graphics style so that they now look better for paint scheme customisation.


(High resolution rendering)

The ships now have thick interior lines to seperate the two main areas that can be painted and I reduced the amount of bright glow around the outside so that the paint schemes dont look too white, although this does make them look more flat.

Weapon turrets, shields and engine trails can be customised to the colour you want as well.

Heres screenshots showing some different colour variants:






Some colours look really awful (black, dark colours) due to how they are multiplied with the base texture, so I may just provide a very large selection of colours that are suitable (but still moddable if you want to edit them) rather than using an unrestricted RGB colour picker to choose.

I was considering making projectiles, missile trails and weapon effects customisable so you can see if it is an enemy firing or one of your own ships. However I think its good to see the type of weapons the enemy is using just from its visual effects (yellow for cannons, red for lasers etc.) so not sure I will change this...

Let me know what you think!

Wednesday 7 November 2012

Recent Updates #2

Some parts of the game I have been working on recently.

Galaxy Changes

I've been having some design problems with the way ships warp around inside star systems for them to reach jumpgates, so I have decided to make some major changes to the way the galaxy is structured and connected together.

At each location on the main galaxy map there will now be a single planet or sector instead of an entire star system containing multiple planets. This will remove a zoom level, so it now goes galaxy > sector instead of galaxy > system > sector.

(Circles on the galaxy map now represent individual planets instead of entire star systems)

The jumpgates have been moved to inside the planet sectors (there are as many jumpgates as there are links on the galaxy map to the sector), so ships no longer warp around the system to reach a jumpgate sector (like EVE Online) It is now more like the game X3 where you can see all ships and where they are travelling to in a single sector.

These changes should make it easier and less complicated to see where all your ships are and the places that need assistance. It will also bring a lot more life to the sectors so they dont feel empty as well as making the maximum galaxy sizes even larger.

Jumpgates

Graphics for the jumpgates are mostly finished although I havn't yet made the visual effects for when ships make a jump. The lights around the outside of the gate shows if the connected sector is friendly, hostile, allied or neutral.


Main Menu

The main menu and loading screens are now working although the title text may change to something a bit better later on. Planning to also add some big randomised ship battles to watch in the background.


Console

Added a console interface that can execute commands to help with testing, changing global settings, spawning ships/objects or for cheating.