Category: gratuitous space battles

The deployment UI for GSB is not as good as it could be. I’m aware of this, and more acutely aware of it, because this is the main meat and potatoes of the game itself. The battles are great fun, and look cool, but a player who really gets into the game will spend considerable time on the deployment screen. I was thinking recently (and a post by a player on the forums reminded me of it) that I should display to the player the ranges he is fiddling with when assigning shooting orders. I’ve ended up fixing four problems here.

Firstly I changed the wording from ‘max range’ to ‘Move to attack at this range’, which makes more sense. Weapons will always fire at targets the minute they enter range, these instructions are for movement, not firing, and tell the ship to move to range X to attack fighters, or Y to attack frigates, depending on the current target. This was not clear. (It’s still imperfect, but better).

Secondly, I wanted to display the range on the screen as you changed it, and decided to re-use the white range circles to do so, which was fine, albeit requiring me to fix all kinds of other minor quibbles. It meant that I should allow the player to drag that window aside so they can see whats going on ( a good idea anyway), leading to a few tooltip bugs I had to fix. Once I was staring at that window, it became clear that a lot of the weapons module strips on there were redundant. If you have 5 cruiser lasers, you only need a single entry for them, to allow you to check and auto-set their maximum range, so now it says cruiser laser (x5) rather than spamming that window.

Minor changes, but lots of minor changes make for a batter, less frustrating and more fun game. Who knows, it may double sales! (unlikely :D)

I’ve been even busier than usual lately, and lost of stuff is in the preverbial inbox. There are two fairly imminent things.

One is patch 1.31. This fixes and improves lots of things, and there is a big annoying bug with the game freezing on startup for some people (very few, thankfully) which it should fix. I need to spend tomorrow on this, as a matter of urgency.

The next is the upcoming expansion pack, which adds a new race. Right now, the plan is for it to add a bunch of things. Graphical asteroid belts (which look l33t), some great new backdrops, likely to be two new missions, and a new race that has limpet mines and radiation guns. wahey!

The problem is that the expansion pack needs some code changes, and I would rather they *all* were in patch 1.31. I don’t ideally want to do 1.31, then in 2 weeks do 1.32 before the expansion, I dont want people to be constantly bugged by patches.

Sadly, I suspect that will be the case, because I want the expansion to be really awesome and it will likely be at least another two weeks of work away anyway, probably more. In any sense, I’m slightly worried that people have seen less frequent updates and wonder if the game is still moving forwards. It definitely is, and it will keep getting better. I just need to focus on one thing at a time. Today it was limpet mines (videos coming soon), tommorow is patch 1.31, and hopefully getting some decent testing done on it, for a mid-end week release.