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)