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

Separate updates for rendering and processing

All my previous games have had quite a simple main loop to them, in theoretical terms, because mostly they were turn based, so you are responding to GUI events or doing end of turn processing. Even my old space game StarLines INC adopted the simplest system in each loop tick which was this:

ProcessStuff()

DrawStuff()

over and over again.

The new games ‘real-time’ bit, has a LOT of stuff going on, and there is a whole bunch of stuff that really doesn’t need to be processed every frame. Lots of it only needs doing five times a second at most.

So today I split things up into

CheckIfWeNeedToProcess()

DrawStuff

CheckIfWeNeedToProcess()

DrawStuff()

etc. of course, the stuff like ship movement and animation all gets processed every frame, otherwise there is no change and you are wasting time, but stuff like updating target selection and checking shield status is now only done 5 times a second. This speeds things up a lot.

The problem I still need to solve is that I do all that processing in one chunk, which might stutter older PC’s. ideally it would be a seperate thread, but that might be a total nightmare to code and debug. I’ll probably split the data into chunks and manage it in discrete subsystems at some point tomorrow.

I also added a new spaceship graphic, and I’m getting the hang of making them look less like stock models now :D

Kudos 2 on the Mac. DONE

Kudos 2 is now available on the Mac. As usual, I partnered with redmarblegames.com to handle porting the game, as I know little about Macs these days.

The games demo download link is here:

http://www.redmarblegames.com/downloads/Kudos2Demo.dmg

The buy page is here:

http://store.esellerate.net/s.asp?s=STR807618070&Cmd=BUY&SKURefnum=SKU05843952168

I’m mulling over the possibilities of an iphone port for the game, with a few people interested in doing it. I think it would do very well, but it would also need some redesign, and I don’t really have time for that right now.

Now I REALLY must get my head stuck into the space strategy stuff.

The mechanics of huge space battles

Lots of science fiction has huge space battles in. In many ways, all that monkeying around with plot, characters and storyline is just foreplay for big fleets of impossibly large space battleships to blast away at each other and go bang.

I applaud this initiative.

And I understand, as someone making entertainment, that so much in the classic sci-fi space battle is bullshit. There are no laser sounds in space. No ship, regardless of damage ever loses its artificial gravity etc etc. This doesn’t bother me, because I’m making a not-too-serious fun battle game, so my lasers will go zap and fizz just like the rest of them.

What I’m more interested, because of the strategy nature of my game, is the actual mechanics of the battles. Take (for example) the big space battle at the start of Revenge of the Sith:

There seem to be some nice huge battleships here blasting the hell out of each other at extremely close range, and lost of tiny fighters flying around going zap zap too. The thing that interests me is the economics of it all. Why can’t side A field a fleet of 50,000 fighter/bombers instead of a nice aesthetically balanced fleet of 10 huge capital ships, 50 average ones and 200 fighters. Each of those capital ships is maybe 5,000 times the size of a one man fighter, and must cost 5,000 times as much to build.

Is it because the fighter’s lasers can’t penetrate the armour of the bigger ships at all? Do they need carriers to get them between systems? do they need refuelling? And given that the fighters fly at 100 times the speed of the bigger ships, how the hell isn’t the fighter vs fighter battle over long before a single capital ship gets within firing range of an enemy capital ship?

These are the questions which currently keep me awake at night, because I’m trying to design a set of spaceship and fleet construction rules that allow you to have lots of freedom, yet still ensure you end up building a fleet of disparate size ships that look good in space battles :D.

Some zapping and blasting

I finally got some not-temp art in there so the ships don’t look so out of place. And I’ve got the system working so you can drag and drop spaceship modules to create new ships, which is nice

The sad state of games PR (oops I meant journalism)

I remember watching a documentary once about how political interviewing has become less sycophantic over the years. It started with a black and white clip where the interviewer ends with this (paraphrased)

“We would like to thank you wholeheartedly minister for taking the time to talk to us today, is there any other message you would like us to broadcast to the people of britain?”

And ended with stuff like this

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI

Games journalism is too often still like the former. here’s a quiote from a games preview I just read:

Journalist: Finally, is there anything else you’d like to add about [game name] or about [franchise name] in general?

Developer: [game-name] has allowed us to create a more-intimate single-player experience while greatly expanding multiplayer. We think we’ve struck a good balance that meets the needs of both audiences.

Journalist: Thanks,  Looking forward to it.

Pathetic. Why don’t they just print the guys press release verbatim and dispense with the pretence of being journalists? If you arent prepared to dig deaper into information that the GAMER might want and the developer might not be keen to reveal, then plrease go work for activisions PR department.