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

Election, lightning server issues…

cliffski

Lots going on.

Firstly there is going to be an ELECTION in the UK. At last. I was so surprised… Anyway, to celebrate this, you can get Democracy 2 for half price. ONLY TODAY. So get clicking! As I live in a safe seat, my vote is practically pointless. Hurrah for our crappy electoral system. But I digress…

Yesterday I was doing various bits like adding support for fixed terrain items to GSB for modders, which means you can do this, and in theory do a naval or ground combat mod. That then led me onwards to add in this, which is an attempt at that flickery lightning effect from Star trek: The Wrath Of Khan. Its configurable on a per-mission basis. I like it.

Also, not related to lightning, my server was down for a while, maybe 25 mins yesterday. Huge apologies. Nothing would have worked, but you should have been able to play GSB, if not upload or download any challenges. It’s fine now.

Back to campaign stuff now… Patch 1.37 will come soon, once I’ve added some stuff the campaign will need.

8 thoughts on Election, lightning server issues…

  1. That looks like poo. Go play Homeworld 2 or even Homeworld, and you’ll see that they had this great effect where the nebula lightened up, but not in it’s whole, just fragments of it. Of course you’re using different technology, so slapping a brightness onto that background is pretty easy, but looks like poo. How about adding more layers and perhaps even individual clouds?

  2. I too live in a safe seat. It’s a sad existence.

    Though to be fair to the floppy haired Tory boy, he has replied to all 3 of my letters in the past year. Though they basically all said “Too bad, I don’t have any interest in representing your opinions”.

  3. well my PPC has written to me after I joined the the new social media grass root networking thingy. Whilst my area is still suffering from its post 70s socialist hangover (cos mummy and daddy voted for them wen they worked in the docks/pits etc ) both the Tories and Independnts seem to be doing well.

    My ‘Vote’ might not make a difference, but given the massive apathy generated by Gordoom and his hench-people never say never.

  4. I think it’s still worth voting, even if you can’t see the point. Most people in this country don’t vote, but if everyone who didn’t vote suddenly decided to vote for, say, the Greens (just an example) then they would probably get into power.
    The same principal can be applied to safe seats. There are probably many people in your area that don’t vote because of the same reason, but if you all decided to vote for the other guy then he would probably win.
    Another way of looking at is is if you choose not to make a difference when you are given the opportunity, then do you really have a right to complain when things don’t go quite how you wanted them to?

    Anyway, onto the new features! I’m loving the static background. I’ve been thinking about doing a Tank mod, so that will be really useful. All I need now is collision detection.
    The lightning’s ok, but I can’t help feeling that doing the whole screen at the same time kinda makes it less realistic (it’s never gonna be, but you know what I mean).
    Maybe doing parts of the screen would be better. It’s harder work, but I would have thought that all you would need to do is overlay a white-to-fade ellipse over part of the background when lightning strikes and make it appear in different places randomly.
    What would be REALLY cool would be for it to sometimes disable some ships for a few seconds! Only ships with that anti-EMP module would be unaffected.

  5. I’d vote for Cliffski if he was campaigning!
    I’d rather see the Gratuitous Space Battles Party any day, it’d liven up Westminster anyway :-D

    I live in a floating constituency, which means we’ll be swamped with the idiots shortly.

    Is it me or have the campaign billboard standards really stooped to their lowest ever this election?
    They all seem to be just childishly calling each other’s leaders names rather than actually putting forward facts / policy!

    Aaaanyway, I like the idea of the lightning effect, it’s looking good but definitely needs a bit more work doing. Like the others have said, just flashing parts of the screen would be better.
    Keep up the good work though!

    Iain

  6. Hmm, would we have critized if Archont hadn’t started so strong ?
    Well, yeah something more local would give a stronger feeling of something happening far far way. (And why not adding 3 or 4 layer of slightly transparent clouds to give increase the effect of distance… Oups already suggested somewhere else).

    And maybe add some occasional storms filling a huge part of the screen once a while. The contrast might give a good feeling of tension !

  7. Double comment Argh !

    A way do something good might be to have spot of light growing, and getting more intensity (instead of playing with intensity only). It might be possible to acheive something nice through adding smaller, britgher, and more flickery spots in a larger one.
    On the top of that add a good deal of randomness. That’s probably a good 10 hours work you already know what you are doing !But it might be good…

  8. Not related, but I simply wanted to say how happy I am to know you’ve actually started porting to mac! WOOOHOOOO :D And steam is coming too, oh my god I’ve got to change pants now :P

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