It’s actually quite easy to overlay colored re-skins onto some of the models in GSB. I might have to do a tutorial and release some of the photoshop files required. I found just slinging a camoflage texture onto the Imperial Centurion cruiser looked quite cool: (click to enlarge)

It’s non trivial, because you need to re-composite all the damage texture stuff together, and it’s not done in game on the fly (sadly), so you need to save out new damage, hulk and sprite textures for any color variation.
Still… it points to future (sequel?) possibilities, as well as the potential for some cool mods. I envisage a fleet of breakway ’seperatist’ ships that differ only in their coloring. or maybe a MK II coloring for each ship. As well as being kinda fun, I think it would be nice to have different texture options for ships so that you can tell apart 2 different configrued ships without staring at the turrets. I would ultimately love a ship texture customiser / chooser / painter thingy.

For now, I’m just stroking my stubble and thinking about the possibilities…

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Ok, so new orders are something people often campaign for, and I like the idea of a ’stay in attack formation” style order for fighters. So today, I went to implement that, and opened an entire canning-factory full of nematodes. I ended up re-writing the AI a bit so there is a definite concept of a fighter squadron (which I’d got by without, until now). The code gets involved, because each squadron needs a leader it can follow, and that leader needs to be re-elected in the case of the leader getting blown up, its engines shot down, caught in a tractor beam or limpet-mined. I need to test all of that works… Also I need code to assign slots in a general formation to each fighter, so they don’t bunch up too much, and look l33t when flying long distances,

I also needed to handle combinations of orders like ’stick together’ and ‘formation’. I think they *do* need to work together, so you can have a fighter squadron sitting in formation at the rear, set to attack effectively only when their parent ship is destroyed, at which point they will then still stick together.

Of course, the big question is “is it best for the fighters to always stick together?” I suspect not, I suspect it depends if you want a bunch of general purpose dogfighters, or a coherent strike force. I like to think it’s a fine balanced decision, but only real life game testing and the eyes of a thousand GSB experts will tell. Here is a video showing how it’s looking right now:

I should probably add some suitable ’stay in formation perkins!’ comms chatter too…

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I’ve been fixing some minor bugs and issues today, and doing some businessy stuff I won’t bore you with. I’ve also been tuidying up the challenge list screen, given the new fangled details window. It now looks like this (click to enlarge)

Basically the details button replaces the old download and delete ones, the history button has moved, and there is a new column showing a challenge’s unique ID, and allowing you to sort by it, handy for finding a specific challenge if you know it’s ID, which I hope will be of use for forum discussions etc.

Feedback most welcome!

Also, GSB got a geat new review here:

http://www.games32.com/Gratuitous-Space-Battles-(PC)-Reviews/p2000_articleid/1296

Yay!

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This isn’t finished yet, so this is just a work in progress screenshot, click it to enlarge…

This is new challenge UI stuff. I got sick of squeezing more columns in 1024 res on the list view, so now those download and delete buttons get replaced by ‘details’ which opens this new screen for a selected challenge. All the old data is here, with room for some more, and the history of that challenge is now auto-downloaded and displayed here at the top right. You can also now see the challenge ID in the titlebar, (I’ll probably add that to the list somehow too). there are two super-exciting new things:

• The challenges now uplaod a screenshot of their deployment, as you can see. Obviously old challenges will not have one, but new ones will. I’m very happy about this
• The challenges now have a parent, because when you win a challenge, you can send your fleet back as a ‘retaliation’. These get listed like any other challenge, but if you pick one of your challenges, you can see a list of it’s retaliations on the bottom window. I don’t have a super-threading view of it all, but this is a first step.

My plan for this is that

• Players will be able to see what a challenge looks like before downloading, which helps detect ’spammy’ fleets for people who prefer not to play against them
• There will be a more on-going to-and-fro between players over who has the best fleet, using retaliations.

I still have more tweaks, and a ton of testing to do, to make this work well. I’m hoping the next patch will really improve the online stuff. Ideas and feedback are most welcome, as ever.

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Yes, so Ubisoft put very tough, over-the-top DRM on Silent Hunter V. Its not exactly news. And some people say it’s cracked (I suspect not fully) and other disagree. Yada yada.

I don’t know whether the DRM was a mistake or not. And frankly, neither do you. There is only one person in the world who knows, and that’s ubisofts accountant. They used DRM because they thought doing so would make them more money. My own investigations suggest that it won’t, but their audience is not my audience. their budget is not my budget, and only they can see their figures. It may well make sense for them. Sure, a lot of ANGRY INTERNET MEN will post in 400+ comment threads about how they were ‘ass-raped by the stalinist scumbags’ at ubisoft, but 400 people are a drop in the ocean when it comes to the market size for AAA games.
Anyway…
The reason they did this is because piracy on the PC is a big problem. For EVERYONE. Gamers and developers alike. Just before posting this, I typed ‘gratuitous space battles’ into google, and saw two of the most popular searches are for ‘torrent’ and ‘rapidshare’. Thanks guys, you are the reason DRM exists. May I recommend the free demo?
Pirating COD 4 makes more sense than pirating a submarine sim. How many other sub sims are there if ubisoft throw their hands in the air and kill the franchise?

Anyway…
I may not know if the DRM was a mistake, but I’m pretty sure they made another one. A big one.

I am 40 years old. I am a hardcore gamer. I have some disposable income. I’ve read about the silent hunter games for years but not bought one yet. I’ve watched a youtube video that makes the game look cool. I am a world war II nut, who recently read churchills account of the war in the atlantic…

I AM DEFINITELY IN THE TARGET MARKET FOR SILENT HUNTER.

And yet I haven’t bought the game yet. Why?
Not the DRM, I’m online all the time, don’t resell my games as a rule, and don’t get too annoyed by it. Why then?
There is no demo

How the fuck do ubisoft think I’m going to know if I’ll like the game when…
1) All discussion of the game online is polluted by arguments about DRM and
2) There is no way to demo the game.

*Sigh*.

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Check this out:

www.indiestrategygames.com

It’s five games being sold as a bundle. Gratuitous Space Battles + Expansion, Solium Infernum, AI War + expansion. It’s a bundle of strategy games by like-minded indie strategy developers, being sold at a discount. In effect, buy two and get one free. Hurrah! Go blog it, tweet it, digg it, whatever it!

On a serious note, this is something I really like doing, because it shows the true potential of the internet, in a way that was much discussed in the 1990s, and now lost, which is the democratisation of access to customers for small businesses.

In theory, as a small indie dev, I have a shopfront every bit as big as EA or Activision or Ubisoft. Its just as easy (I’d argue WAY easier) for you to buy my games than it is to buy the latest AAA game from the big studios. In practice you don’t do that, on the whole…

In practice, not only do you still buy the AAA games, but if you *do* buy the indie games, you tend to buy them from someone else. I just got my stardock check for last month, and it’s not bad, quite a few sales, much appreciated. I genuinely appreciate every sale. However, isn’t it *slightly* a cause for a wistful sigh that the majority of semi-succesful indie games are sucessful through third parties? Wouldn’t it be nicer if there were as few parties between the gamer and the creator of a game as possible?

I really think so. I like services like impulse and steam, they are very developer friendly and give a good deal, but I also like a direct contact with my buyers. This strategy bundle is a step in that direction. There is nobody administrating this deal (except the card payment company as usual – BMT). It’s run by Me, Vic and Chris. We all contributed a little bit of time to make it happen. I *really* want it to be a success, because I’d love to do more things like it, with other developers, and other games. Maybe one day www.indiestrategygames.com will be quite a fully-featured site. Who knows?

Anyway, it only lasts till monday. Tell everyone!

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Like many geeks I fantasise about turning my house into it’s own power station using renewable tech like solar panels. Wind doesn’t scale down, solar does. Having moved house, it’s now viable to consider installing solar panels. In fact since the govt recently introduced very high new feed-in-tarrifs, its super sensible to do so. Effectively you get a 7% return on the investment, better than most banks for the forseeable future. And that’s not even accounting for eco-smugness.

Anyway, the installation costs of solar are way beyond my means right now, but I’m making tiny steps towards energy independence. We bought one of these:

That’s a wood-burning stove, not the cat. Wood-burning is very very efficient (in a closed, not open fire). The local power source is longleat, a few miles away. Wood gets delivered by the ton. A ton of wood is a LOT, and you can’t burn it ‘green’, it has to be left to dry out and ’season’, hence we built a log store:

Which I’m very proud of. It has proper tiles and everything! There is just one drawback though. We built the log store to house the 1 ton of wood we bought from longleat, but then we had 3 trees chopped down in the garden. I had underestimated the amount of wood that generates, and that’s it, in the log store, almost full.

So the longleat wood which we paid for, is going mouldy in the garage whilst our freshly cut (free!) wood is in the log store. I have neither the energy of enthusiasm to build yet another log store. (It cost about £200 in materials, and a few days hammering and screwing).

Anyway, the good news is that the felling of the trees was triple-efficient. Not only do we generate wood we can burn that never leaves the site (eco-smugness++), but it means more sun falls on the once shaded house, which makes it warmer (eco-smugness+++) and opens up the long term possibility of having solar panels. (eco-smugness*2).

I’ve wanted solar power for so many years that I reckon I’ll have a special celebration 90%  games discount day if I ever get some installed

Yesterday we had fog drifting over the fields, men wielding chainsaws and some big bird of prey circling the house. It was like a stephen king novel.

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I’m going to rant about 3D. In two different ways. Stick with me.

1) I think 3 D ruins some games. I remember when all games were 2D, then I remember the first isometric RTS games. (In fact arguably the first was ant attack). Moving the camera in isometric games was easy. When they introduced a limited 4-way rotate to the genre, that got darned confusing. Then came 3D. the first 3D RTS games sucked massively. Then we got mroe of them, and they sucked a bit less. In my limietd opinion the two that do it well are Total War and Company Of heroes. I think COH is better. Why? Neither game makes me waste half my gameplay moving the camera around.

I have a pal who has problems with 3D cameras. Real bad ones. he can’t play an FPS. He can kick my ass big time at CoH. He has tried Men of war, but literally prefers CoH because you can’t rotate the camera by default in CoH. I agree. Watch a video of Eve online and note how much time the player is fucking around with the camera. I played a 3D space RTS recently to try it out, and got sick of the 3D antics. I’m a human, not a bird. I percieve 3D but I’m not good at planning movement in it. I bet there are planets of bird people where Homeworld and Descent are the top 2 games.

BTW I *can* handle 3D in a game. I can kick ass at Call of Duty. I just don’t like a game to be all about the third dimension in terms of planning. Most mass market usable games operate in 2D. They use 3D graphics to draw an effectviely 2D world, with 2D gameplay. Descent and Homeworld were 3D, also flight sims. Not much else. Portal I guess?

2) When i said I perceive 3D, thats true. But it’s also a lie. I suffer from this. Stereo Blindness. It means two things:

• I can’t see through binoculars easily
• Avatar was dull.

Actually avatar was ok, but not earth shattering. I can see a vague slight 3dness to it every 20 minutes or so, but that’s it. I REALLY hope this isn’t the future of movies. If so, I’ll have to keep my money. Paying extra to have to wear dorky glasses to watch a movie in 2D is not my idea of progress. If people think we will all buy new TV’s for this, they are dead wrong. I went ot a demo at blitz games kindly given by the excellent oliver brothers on 3D gaming. Sadly, it looked 2D to me. Gutted. (On the other hand their engine is flipping awesome.)

Above all, I don’t like gimmicks driving artistic development. 3D might be good for the odd CGI film, but lets not default to it. It gets over-used and in the way. People with spears tend to point them self-conciously at the camera a lot. It makes film making even more expensive, and thus dumbed down and generic. (unobtainium? really?). Personally I would have taken every cent of the 3D budget and spent it on writers. Preferably Iain M Banks or Greg Bear, or anyone over the age of twelve, basically. I’m not convinced special effects or 3D have massively improved the long term quality of movies. In 50 years time will avatar be seen as a ‘must-see’ movie? I doubt it. Casablanca probably will still be, despite not even having color.

Sometimes it’s not all about the budget, or the tech.

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Ok so here we go, It’s finally ready for release. Hopefully all will go smoothly! Here is the new DLC for GSB:

THE ORDER are a group of aliens who take their beliefs very seriously. Their holy book may have been written when The Order had spears and lived in mud huts, but they cling to the letter of the book even now, ten thousand years later. And you no what isn’t in the holy book? That’s right… YOU.

And the order interpret this the way every rational life-form would. That you are heathen aliens who must be destroyed in the name of ‘The One True God’.  They tried Hymns, then they tried leaflets, but now they are trying nuclear missiles, radiation guns and limpet mines. Stand aside heathen alien scum.

Details here

Video here:

The order have three new weapons. Radiation guns, firing radioactive bullets which infect your ship and do damage long after the impact (cue nice green glowy effect), Nuclear Missiles, which are a similar effect in missile form, and limpet mines, which are like remote controlled drones which stick to enemy fighters and drag them, down to speeds where anyone can hit them. They also have faster firing cruiser rockets called ‘firefly’ rockets. In terms of ship bonuses’ they are big on power, low on speed.

I hope you enjoy them. BTW, One of the new scenarios is a survival mode map. I know you enjoy them

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So… I did patch 1.34, which had a bunch of minor stuff that was fairly urgent, and immediately everything went wrong. I’ve  moved to Windows 7 on 64 bit, and that meant a new PC, and thus nothing worked. I needed to install the Microsoft Directx sdk, which is fine, but the old version I used would not install on W7. That meant getting the new version, which took 2 days to download (grrr), but installed, so I could actually debug my games again….

But it also meant that when I recompiled the game for a patch, it got automatically tied to the latest d3dx dll, which is weird because I havent changed any graphics engine code at all. It seems Microsoft defaults to requiring the latest of everything. Cheers guys.

And here it gets annoying. Because the machines I test on all have the SDK installed, I had no idea that I was suddenly needing a new (not normally installed) DLL until I released the patch and got complaints. Eeek!. I’m 99.99% sure this is fixed now with 1.35. I couldnt get the stupid-ass directx redist installer to actually install the new files, so I just recompiled the game forcing it to use includes and libs from the older SDK.

What a pain!

In other news the ’spot the feature’ is that missile trails are going above the ship that fired them. They never used to do that. Nobody even notices when I point it out. Bah. Also, multiple-rockets now split apart in a more convincing way now, and tons of really minor stuff is now fixed. Hurrah!

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