Category Archives: Yleinen

Giving commands one by one to huge numbers of ships is not very handy, not to mention all other problems like small ships getting lost in some corners of space. So I added some group controls to the combat UI. Now ships can form groups, like in many RTS-games, and there is also a buttonContinue reading “Unit groups”

Worked on initializing the combat and star map scenes with correct starting information. Now if fleets meet at a star system, a combat scene is started and corresponding data is transferred to the combat scene. After the combat the star map is loaded and casualties are removed from the fleets. It is still handy toContinue reading “Scene transitions and basic combat AI”

There will be four different mounting options for each weapon. Normal and right angle mounts are fixed to the direction they are pointing at. Then there are gimbal and turret mounts. Turrets are able to aim at targets in a semi sphere area. Turrets are more expensive, require more power, more space and they doContinue reading “Gimbals”

Updated all physics based direction tracking to be a bit smarter. Now they take all movements into account and still try to guide the turret/ship/gimbal to the correct direction the fastest way without overshooting. The following videos demonstrate the effects. The turrets try to optimally match the speed of the target, taking into account itsContinue reading “Updated tracking”

Added possibility to give movement commands relative to some other ship. Should be useful when maneuvering bigger armies and ships of different speeds. In practice it means that the move commands can be set to follow another ship. In the fist video I have an overly complicated chain of ships following one another and inContinue reading “Relative movement”

Finally starting the star map scene. Currently there are randomly distributed stars and fleets of different colors moving around. Changing the turn makes them do the set movement. There are lots of options on the rules of how to allow the movement between stars and how to restrict it. If ships are able to jumpContinue reading “Star map view”

Testing all ship sizes. The size classes are fighter, corvette, frigate, destroyer, cruiser and battleship. Bigger ships will be less maneuverable, but have more space for weapons and internal components (and also power to support them).

Weapons, hit points and armor are not the only things that affect the outcome of combat. Here you can see what happens when fighters try to attack a frigate with turrets. The first fighter group uses aggressive attack mode while the other one uses evasive attack mode. In defence of the underachieving frigate, it doesContinue reading “Attack modes”

Testing and demonstrating the flight characteristics of ships of different sizes. Also colliding with them a bit for fun, I mean, to test that they behave properly. Ships here are from fighter sized to big frigates.

New weapons and models in action. Here some fighter class ships attack three frigate class ships. They do an “aggressive attack”, meaning that they only maximize their damage on the enemy. First they attain the same velocity as their target, when that is achieved they continue to shoot at the enemy. The frigates just moveContinue reading “Aggressive attack mode”