Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Two new features for GSB

I was honestly trying to work on new DLC, but hey, I ended up adding and improving some stuff. One thing I ended up doing was mouse cursor changes, so it actually changes to the windows pointy finger thing now to show you that you can click something, which is quite nifty. I also added two features.

The first feature is the ‘fleet overlay’ at the left of the screen. It’s a scrollable column of icons for every ship in the fleet. The tooltips show your current damage percentage, and they fill red as the ships take damage. you can also click them to zoom to that ship. It’s a handy way to see at a glance in big battles which ships are taking hits. I also added a tiny arrow icon to toggle that new feature on or off, in case some people don’t like it. I have a tiny UV bleeding issue on that button I must fix…

gratuitous space battles fleet overlay UI

The second feature is rather cool for statistics-freaks. If you have played much GSB, and spent much time on the ship design screen, you will know the frustration of seeing “weight=122” and not really knowing how that compares to anything else. Obviously you can go through each module of the same ship class and compare, but wouldn’t it be better if the game makes that trivial to do?
Tada! It does. You can click any of those data entries at the bottom left now, and get a comparison window, ready sorted and scrolled to show where the current module fits in. I hope people find this useful.

gratuitous space battles ship design screen

Now I can get back to work designing fleets for the religious aliens in the next DLC…

Both these spangly new things will be in version 1.32, which will get released shortly before the new DLC. Yay!


9 thoughts on Two new features for GSB

  1. Excellent! The fleet overlay reminds me of Sins Of A Solar Empire, which is definitely a good thing.

  2. Those are two really good ideas! I’ve often been through all the items in the game trying to work out which one is best for different purposes. This will make it much easier. Looking forward to the DLC!

  3. Personally I don’t find it too time consuming working out how heavy modules are in relation to each other…but the fleet overlay sounds like a great idea. It is a little bit annoying when I realise I’ve lost a ship without knowing where and how, the fleet overlay will really help with that! Great idea, I look forward to using it!

  4. Good work. Both look like very nice additions.

    That you are able to add them so (comparatively) easily says some good things about the code you’ve developed.

  5. Looks wonderful! I was hoping you’d add more information for us stat geeks. You know what else would be crazy weird? After a battle is complete, a graph that shows damage done over time. You vs. the Enemy.

  6. Thanks for implementing the feature I’ve been silently dreaming about from the day one :) (comparison window).

    Now the only thing to put the statistic freak mind at peace would be “damage inflicted”\”ship classes destroyed” (for fighter combat efficiency evaluation) breakdown per ship (perhaps – per ship design, div amount of similar ships deployed)… Bonus points if such reports could be stored and\or printed – they make for a nice efficiency analysis material…

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