Tuesday 25 November 2014

Mining


Lots of changes to mining and asteroids.

There is now just one "metal" resource that is mined from asteroids rather than the previous Common, Reactive, Radioactive and Rare metals that have been in the game until now. This is to reduce the orders micromanagement for mining ships. Now there is no need to constantly keep track of what they are mining and balance the amounts of each resource you need.

To keep some complexity there are now a lot more asteroid minerals, each having a different maximum yield and mining multiplier (accessibility). Yield is the maximum amount you can mine from the asteroid and the mining multiplier affects mining laser module speed.

Rare asteroid minerals will be faster to mine and take longer until they become depleted, but every mineral type still provides the same "metal" resource used for building stuff.

During galaxy generation there will be an option to re-spawn asteroids some time after they have been mined completely. When an asteroid re-spawns it will return as the next smaller size (Large becomes a Medium etc.)

Larger asteroids have much higher yield and mining multipliers. This is to discourage mining in the same asteroid belt forever if you are going to use the re-spawn option. It will still be better to look for larger asteroids.

Asteroid stats example:

Large: Yield = 2400, Multiplier = 140%
Medium: Yield = 1200, Multiplier = 120%
Small: Yield = 600, Multiplier = 100%
Depleted: Yield = 300, Multiplier = 80%

Asteroid Minerals

Listed below are the asteroid minerals currently in the game. I decided to use real mineral names found on Earth rather than made up ones. Not sure if this would be realistic as I expect there are some minerals below that wouldn't be found on asteroids. (let me know of any)

The element composition of each mineral shown on the tool-tips have no effect on gameplay, just something interesting I wanted to add.

Common Minerals: Sphalerite, Chalcopyrite, Pyromorphite, Cuprite, Stibnite, Kamacite, Acuminite and Pyrolusite.

Uncommon Minerals: Chromite, Boehmite, Wolframite, Cobaltite, Faustite, Rutile and Barite

 Semi-Rare Minerals: Ruthenium, Molybdenite, Polarite, Thorite, Rhodium, Iridium and Gold


 Rare Minerals: Rhenium, Bromellite, Palladium, Osmium, Gadolinite, Monazite, Churchite and Sylvanite.

Planet Tooltips

Asteroid details will be shown on discovered planet tooltips.

Bonus Screenshot

(One of the new mining ships)

Saturday 23 August 2014

Research

The research system in Galaxial has undergone many redesigns over the summer and has turned out quite different to what I originally had planned. The user interface still needs some work but is now mostly finished.


Once you have enough research data it can be spent on projects to instantly 'unlock' them. Rather than choosing what to research and then having to wait for it to be completed. The reason I choose to do it this way is because the research data already takes a long time to accumulate and will also be required for building really advanced ships and modules.

The technologies shown in brown are unique to the faction you are playing and will generally provide strong bonuses. The same basic technologies, ships and modules will be available to all factions but there will be a lot of faction unique stuff that is more specialized and will allow different play styles and strategies.

I am still undecided on how many levels to have for each research project. I would like for there to be no limit (unlimited research) possibly with diminishing returns the more you research a technology, but this could potentially lead to a lot of balancing issues.

Maybe its not a problem? For example if the player becomes too powerful then all other empires could become afraid and form a coalition against you.

Resources

A resources bar has been added along the top of the screen to show your empires total resource stockpile.


The resources are (from left to right): Credits, Research Data, Crew, Troops, Common Metals, Rare Metals and Precious Metals.

Crew and Troops are a recent addition and I will explain how they work in a future development log as they are not quite finished yet.

Ore mined from asteroids require transporting to colonies that have refinery facilities and after being processed into metals they are then added to the resource stockpile.

Colony Graphics

Graphics for the colony populations have been improved slightly again to match the same style used for the ships. Facilities such as shipyards, refineries, hydroponics will be constructed at the empty inner circles. New graphics for those haven't been created yet.


Minimap

Added a button to lock the minimap viewing position so you can keep an eye on two locations at once. You wont have to rely on just this as there will eventually be some kind of message/alert system for when important events happen.


Most of the user interface windows/widgets in the game look much cleaner now after removing a lot of the inner white outlines and added some subtle gradients.


Galaxial is proving to be an enormous game to develop solo!
Thanks again for your patience and I hope you will really enjoy it when you finally get to play.

Monday 24 February 2014

Sound Effects and Projectiles Video


Stress Test Video

For the video I created a galaxy with 75 planets and placed 60 ships in each of them (4500 ships in total)

Each of the smaller ships have the most CPU intensive weapons (rapid fire auto-cannons) to fire at the indestructible capital ship all at once. This was to test that the game will handle the large number of objects and sound effects.

There are no simplified calculations in the game for battles that you are not currently viewing (apart from rendering optimizations). All AI, ships, collision detection, projectiles and missiles are always fully simulated.

I expect the ship count could be significantly higher for normal game-play as there wont be battles happening all at exactly the same time like in this video. In a typical game you will most likely have the majority of ships transporting cargo, mining or patrolling. Those kind of tasks don't require much processing power at all.

The frame-rate displayed in the video would normally have been much higher but the recording software was limiting it quite badly. Running the same test scenario without recording I averaged around 50 FPS.

System specs used:

AMD Phenom X4 9950 (2600 MHz, 4 core)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260
4 GB RAM

Audio Library

I recently switched the audio library that Galaxial uses over to irrKlang as I was having problems with OpenAL drivers and sound crackling. Overall I'm really pleased with irrKlang's performance and ease of use.

In the video there are often over 300 sound effects playing at once! Each individual projectile from the auto-cannon weapons have their own firing and impact sound effect. Ships also have engine rumbling sounds which sound great when there's not much going on.

A lot of the sound effects I'm using at the moment are just placeholders, but I am planning to get professional effects made by a sound designer when the game is almost feature complete.

Cargo Transfer

The drag and drop user interface for manually transferring cargo between docked ships and colonies has been finished. Holding shift while dragging items will let you set the amount to transfer.


The Load/Unload buttons at the bottom will attempt move all items from one cargo hold to the other, so long as there is available space in the ship. Colonies will have unlimited storage space.

Bonus Screenshot

(New Jumpgate graphics)