Category: programming

I’ve been tweaking and fixing a few small things lately, sounds that do not play, some graphical problems, and some bugs caused by recently introduced new features (I managed to screw up the way shields worked when I added cod to make ‘stacked’ shields less effective.

In amongst this, the only true ‘new’ feature that has gone in is the alliance ‘lightning gun’. It’s basically just a beam laser, but drawn entirely differently. 10 minutes of reading photoshop tutorials got me up to speed with rendering lightning, and then a bunch of rendered strips of lightning later, I wrote code which works out how many ‘chunks fit in a beam, and stuck together a string of them so the ship looks like its electrocuting its enemies.

The code isn’t that simple, because you want the beam to zig zag everywherem, but hit its origin and target exactly, which is a bit fiddly. I also had it change which bits of lightning to use every 10th of a second so it looks like it flickers, and had to ensure that multiple beams from the same ship start at different points so you can’t tell the same texture pattern was being used.

Having said all this, the biggest effort was picking out a sound effect for it, which I’m still not happy with and am not confident is playing right. 30 minutes of previewing sounds of electrical static is a bit wearisome in 86 degrees in the indoors with an overheating PC by your legs.

All good fun I guess.

I have a vaguely usable hacked together damage editor which means I can make a few improvements to the ships now. I’ve only done 1 so far, but with the tools in place the rest shouldn’t take more than a day. Here is a screenshot showing a federation cruiser and the changes:

A) This shows that some damage has knocked out the lighting on the warp nacelle. This is actually just visual and does not correspond to engine damage, that would be a nightmare, but it still looks better than them staying on :D Also, two of the tiny orange lights have been knocked out by another hit (bottom A)

B) These tiny impact ‘scars’ are new. By having a lot of these scattered around the ship, the targets selected by enemy ships seem less predictable and more random, although they are pre-assigned in truth, and then scrambled in order.

C) My editor lets me easily add ‘permanent’ smoke or spark effects to each damage texture, so they don’t seem too similar. Most major impacts result in a complex smoke and flames emitter anyway, but only some of those smoke effects stay around for the lifetime of the ship.

This screenshot was taken using my debugging hacks, so it’s not really representative. Normally a ship hit this much would be flying through a lot of debris and maybe hulks from other ships, so it would look a bit better :D

Comments?

My editors and tools are always really bad. Something has to give when you are a lone developer and with me it’s tools. I’m slowly getting better at it. It’s just a time thing. Today I spent most of the day getting my feeble ship hull editor to let me graphically position and assign particle emitters to damage sprites. (Screenshot below).

basically when a ship gets hit a pre-defined chunk of a damage texture gets drawn at the impact point, and it comes with a number of attached particle emitters. they are only visible fairly close up. there is also an additional temporary emitter that’s much bigger, but these ones are the tiny sparks that flicker over the burning hull of the ship after the smoke and flames have died down.

It took much longer than it should have to get this in, but it’s good because previously I placed them by hand in paintshop pro, then noted the pixel position and copied it to a text file. (laborious eh?)

This way I can placed dozens a minute and thus there will be a lot more of them :D. Tomorrow I’m going to do nothing but set up fleets and play out battles to check everything works and that the range of weapons and defences is acceptable.