News
Christmas updateDecember 23rd, 2021
This "exciting" update brings more textures to your ships! Together with this comes 2 color paint scheme. You can go to options and set your default colors, which will be used in campaign. Because you can set color same as your enemies, you can now also change sensor/minimap colors to green/blue/red. Thanks to a lot of new textures I started loading compressed textures from disk which not only speeds up loading, but also saves some disk space (in good part because I no longer store roughness/metalness/masks as separate images)
In other exciting news, one whole new mission was added to campaign, which makes it 10 now. I finally got around to implementing preserving of selection groups between missions, which I really should have done sooner. Another thing that helps in new mission is that your ships no longer spawn as an ugly pile but in a formation, truly some revolutionary features there.
I now also have a stupid twitter account, you can follow me there to avoid refreshing this page once in a blue moon and finding that nothing has changed. I'm talking to that one person that visits this page, you know who you are!
You can grab the current release here (.zip 300 MB). It also appears this runs pretty okay on linux with WINE. Although pretty okay in this case means that I've tried it on my 10 year old notebook, it runs, it runs out of memory for textures (note to self: make option for lower texture size) and for reasons unknown, direct lighting doesn't work, but it runs, which is a start!
More missions and rebalancingJuly 30th, 2021
Two posts in a row that aren't a year apart? What is going on? Well, not much...
I've uploaded latest build (go to downloads), that contains two more missions (technically three, but one of them doesn't really have any objectives).
Apart from that, some more ships got textures and everything got more explosion particles. I've also finally replaced the shitty bloom I had there
since forever for something a lot better.
In terms of rebalancing, apart from previously mentioned decrease of available resources and cargo capacities on ships, I've doubled hitpoints on all ship subsystems, but left hardpoints as they were. This worked nicely in a way that it now makes sense to not completely destroy every ship, but once it isn't a danger anymore leave it be. Since there aren't as many ships as before, it takes longer to completely destroy a ship, so it gives you some incentive to micromanage your ships. Your ships have more chances to actually survive a fight as well, which allows their experience to accumulate.
As always, while doing the whopping 2 additional missions, lot of bugs and weird behaviors we're fixed. One feature I added is form to send feedback directly from game, so if there is anything that sucks and could be improved, you can let me know from there! (I mean, if the server doesn't crash) One of the things that is never improved in this game is sound, so you might want to turn some of it off. Last time I checked, your units were always predicting they are going to lose...
Some texturesMarch 15th, 2021
In an uncharacteristic move, I'm posting some update and not even a year passed from the last one...
Anyway, for a long time I had these spaceships without textures and considered it beyond my capabilities to do something about it.
Suddenly I had an urge to try out Substance Painter and see if I can do something with software like this.
Instead of this being a praise of Substance Painter, I actually ended up doing it in free beta (will this be free in future?)
of Quixel Mixer. It isn't anywhere as complete as Substance, but hey, it is free, and it was enough for the things I needed.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and it is probably too detailed for RTS anyway.
And here are the 4 lucky ships that got makeover
And here is one in 3D, because why not
And that is pretty much it for now. I've been working on some rebalancing of resources and construction times, because I've been playtesting my campaign and found out that you quickly end up with 30 ships, and it quickly devolves into situations where you have so many ships that you don't have to care about any positioning at all, and if ship gets targeted, it doesn't come out of fight alive, so all the damage levels is pointless. In addition to that I also made a single new mission (wow!...), and whatever general improvements.
Update, if you can believe itDecember 21st, 2020
I'm not gonna blame any lack of progress this year on corona, because let's be real, it should have given me more time to work on this, so I'm just gonna blame it on laziness. So let's find out about all the new exciting features
Your ships now gain experience when they do or receive damage. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to make it more complicated and there are two experience values. One is gained
by doing damage, and this experience increases gun/beam reload speed and accuracy, and missile replenishing speed. The other experience is gained by receiving damage, and it
increases speed of passive self-repair of ships outside of combat, and more importantly reduces incoming damage. While all this makes a lot of things more complicated, there
is at least one positive side effect - it can be used to make hero ships in campaign (amazing...).
Second most exciting feature is added minimap (what do you mean there wasn't minimap?). When playtesting my stupid mission I came to conclusion that switching to/from sensor view
doesn't really cut it, so I added a small minimap like you can find in practically in every RTS. If new enemy ship is detected, it will be blinking for two seconds to attract
attention.
I added a whopping 3 new missions to the campaign. It is incredible how many weird bugs I've encountered while playtesting those. E.g. harvester turning sideways when game was loaded,
game crashing when ship warped out and warped back in before it's trail disappeared, and always my favorite - bugs related to scripting serialization.
Overall I think I got the game a bit more towards the fun side of things, so that's good. Here's hoping that next update will not take another year.
Here is extremely low effort video of the game :) . I couldn't be arsed to spend more than 10 minutes on this, apparently...
Update! (seriously!)December 6th, 2019
As said in previous post, graphics were reworked a bit, which ended up looking nicer, and probably introduced new bugs (OpenGL is fun!). As a bonus, it also runs faster on my old-ass notebook, which is also nice. Extremely boring "campaign" was added, which so far has 4 missions, not much happen in them, except for last, which conveniently misses dialogs, which with a level of writing I can produce, works in its favor. Lot of crap was fixed when doing this, so there's that.
As always, I'm looking for help with everything :)
There will also be some multiplayer session organized this week (if you're reading this, it is probably already too late, or you're here because you know about it!).
If you want to be notified in the future, discord is currently your best bet.
