News
The year of the nothingburgerOctober 27th, 2019
So a year has passed and nothing was done, which is appropriate, since nobody reads this anyway :derpyemoticon: (if you read this, say hello!). Seriously though, while no new release is ready just yet, there is some progress, even though it is all moving at the speed of Star Citizen. I was really bothered by the amount of aliasing and stuff like FXAA was just hopeless with it. So I redid the ill-conceived deferred shading into regular-ass forward shading and now I'm just using MSAA like a regular sane person. I also changed aesthetics a little bit to have more color, but don't worry, all ships are still untextured! :(
Apart from graphics, I began work on some sort of campaign, which has 4 missions right now (the first two are extremely boring and tutorialy though). This also lead to some script improvements, new ships, balancing and fixing bugs, improvements to turret aiming (now beams can utterly obliterate fighters if they have 0.0 drift!), and some editor improvements (which I can only guess is super exciting for everybody!)
That's it for now. If you're reading this, please say hello on e-mail or discord (bottom of page) and share how many times have you refreshed this page in the last year :)
Update & multiplayer session 2September 20th, 2018
Another update is here, and it didn't even take a year! Some abilities were added, some crappy visualization of some abilities was added. Selecting of stuff was improved and no longer requires to have mouse directly over object when clicking. Game speed now can be changed up to 4x, even in multiplayer, where lowest speed among players is used (speed can be changed at any time in game). There are probably more improvements, like e.g. that tutorial no longer crashes and so on.
In order to not be all positive, forums are now down, because to collapsed when I tried to update software... Nobody used them anyway, so whatever. Currently you can use only mail or discord to contact me (I may add public discord invite link later).
There is also another planned multiplayer session, so watch out for that timer up on this page if you would like to join. Be sure to download latest version and try out tutorials. If you cannot run it, be sure to have that redist installed.
Update & multiplayer sessionJanuary 7th, 2018
After some RL-caused delays, another update is here! New version can be found in downloads!
All the old testing assets were removed, leaving us with one faction with original ships, tech tree and some illusion of balancing. This version contains two single player missions/tutorials. First is focused on commanding very small fleet and guiding it through mission, second is focused on station aspect of the game: building fleet, harvesting resources, research and fighting enemy AI (dumb script).
This release contains some weird crashes that don't even produce minidump (if they do, please send it to me!) and occasional desyncs. Game will try to resync, so that shouldn't be that big of a problem as long as it doesn't happen frequently. While annoying, I wanted to finally get this release out there, because it improves much more that it breaks.
In addition to this release, I'm organizing a multiplayer session. Initial plan is for January 16th, at 7pm UTC. Countdown should appear in this page's head. Goal of this is to gain some feedback, test it all out and potentially gain some collaborators! In case this time(zone) doesn't work for you, we can organize another session, e.g. during weekend, in the forums.
Regular updateNovember 4th, 2017
I cannot put enough quotation marks around word regular, so I won't try. Anyway, while I was trying to get some better tutorial mission together, I realized all kinds of crazy data structures are handy in script, so I finally done proper automatic serialization of script state. This took way too long mostly because it was quite frustrating, and that isn't kind of work you look forward to to be doing in your free time. But it got sorted out eventually.
One tutorial mission is almost done (basics of combat), and I would like to make another focused around building forces and fighting dumb AI (=simple script), before making another release. I also made damage models for most ships (excluding corvettes), which has small gameplay implication of spawning debris, which can be salvaged for resources. On that note, two support ships were added, one "support", that can salvage debris, repair or scrap nearby ships, and has some abilities, like transfer or drain energy. Other support ship is "research". Building it will speed up your research, but it costs a lot of crew (not yet sure if that matters too much). There is now basic tech tree that unlocks building of ships, so it has something to do. I also arrived to conclusion that having two resource types is too complicated, so I repurposed secondary resource to increase research speed. If it is on ship that can perform research, it gets consumed for boost in research speed.
Aside from that, I spent some time migrating project to new computer and upgrading to Visual Studio 2017, which included upgrading and rebuilding all used libraries, so that added to delays too. Another release should come soon™, with much luck this month, and I would like to accompany it with little multiplayer session (I'll post on forums to some thread with default e-mail notifications about exact time of that)
Semi-automatic debris and stuffMarch 27th, 2017
Biggest highlight of this update is a system which can create debris in Soil editor, if you do not wish to model it by hand. Only thing you must do is create some meshes which will be used as "debris carvers", assign them to explosions. This is mesh that will be booleaned with parent mesh (e.g. ship's subsystem), intersection will create debris and debris carver will be subtracted from original. This will probably improve in the future with some more visual fluff, but it is okay for now. This also motivated me to change rendering to support multi-material meshes, since that became super convenient with debris (and is now limited to this use). This whole thing comes with limitation that all meshes must be manifold.
I also done some minor rebalancing, which lead to two nice little additions. First is "compare" panel in editor, which will create another panel with some other stat so you see what parameters are on e.g. other ship. I believe this is very helpful, because I found myself doing screenshots to compare before... Second little improvement is that missiles and bullets now inherit parent's velocity, which got quite ugly after rebalancing. Rebalancing itself consisted of increasing speed of all ships and fighters to nearly double, which also prompted me to improve targeting algorithm because some problems arisen when things move too fast in certain directions (mostly when target was approaching turret at 45° angle). I also got rid of all old testing fighters and created new ones for Viridian faction. Another addition is missile destroyer, which already had a model, but now also has turrets.
Some other minor improvements consist of various bugfixes, one that could lock your keys when you pressed them multiple times during loading or some random stutter, other could prevent ship from being removed when destroyed if some other ship had it selected as fighter target. Last but not least is very minor optimization in how objects are stored, which should help when there are multiple battles going on, but doesn't help much if all is happening in one big cluster. As a bonus, I don't need to sort objects into lists of fixed sizes but can query for objects in certain radius, which is very welcome quality of life improvement, especially when dealing with arcane code...
Plans for near future include some more balancing work, adding of some big station to replace crappy makeshift one and possibly creating new tutorial mission. Other than that, I would like to implement some better SSAO, anti-aliasing and reduce a number of data used for multiplayer.
