Digga's Summer Project

Hey guys, just wanted an official place to post news about the game i am working on, and this is the perfect place.

Gameplay will heavily be inspired by Freelancer. I am trying to minimic the controls as best i can. Everything works great right now, except (I feel, anyway) that the camera is a little off…its very hard to get it just right… freelancer has such a specific feel. anyway, i don’t know if thats a good thing or a bad thing so i will let you guys decide.

please give me some feed back on what you think of it so far (again, mainly just the ‘feel’ of it but any crits will do). and you are welcomed to ask any questions you wish… i will try to answer them as best i can.

engine being used is Unity3 Pro.

current state of development: Setting down all the foundations…

web demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/Showcase/WebPlayer.html

Exe: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/SummerProjR2.zip

Dockbay Controls:
Click and drag LMB to move camera
N to spawn new ship
S to save ship
D to delete save data
L to load save
R to restart (preserves save data)
U to undock
Click on any component to deal 10 damage. Wings HP: 10, Body HP: 100
Keep mouse still for 2 seconds to activate ‘idle mode’ (Cycles through various camera angles every 10~ seconds)

Flight Controls:
W A S D to move
Move mouse around to look
X to reverse
Tab for thruster
Space to stabilize. (This is active by default, press space to begin moving!)
Z for engine cut
Click on any component to deal 10 damage. Wings HP: 10, Body HP: 100
U to re-enter the dock
Automaticly saves your ship state when re-entering the dock

tears

i am afraid i have many things to nut out still… so this’ll happen time to time

Exe uploaded, first post updated. see how you go with that mate.

i understand exactly what you mean with the twitchyness. its overly sensitive. just had a brainwave, actually… i think the amount the player should turn exponentially increases from the center going out to the edges of the screen… thing that would work well… it gets more sensitive closer to the edge of the screen… haha… just talking to myself, this is what i’ve been doing to get the camera working the way it does…so much fiddling… argh!!

i will take the shaders off in the next build so there are less issues. they are stock ones that come with unity, and i am just trying to get some attention because a plain dev build will be alot less interesting than one with bloom etc haha we are all suckers for it, dont lie! plus i wanted to give a taste of what can be achieved with it

edit:

also missing stardust hey that will give you all the sense of movement needed. but all in good time…

might apply a ‘debug’ version of the stardust effect - just an effect i can slap on and delete after i am done testing…like the contrails…the contrails (when the game is complete) will be generated after the component scans its children and detects a contrail hard point…right now though, i just slapped them on to the wings for debugging

could you elaborate? lean how?

ah right… well i am installing freelancer now (i’ve been going off of youtube videos and memory up until now, just found my cd) and i will have a look into it. must just be a camera thing though, because i distinctly remember that in multiplayer, players only turned along one axis, they didn’t bank…i remember seeing players afk or typing, with their mouse off-center. their ships would just rotate on the Y axis, relative to the ship…

yep i booted up freelancer and i can see what you guys are talking about. getting it to roll isn’t hard, just having difficulty preventing the camera from rolling as well lol

ok, stripped the demo of shaders, and implemented banking. thats it for me tonight i think…3 am here in the land of oz new versions in the first post, links have changed.

i am personally pretty excited about how it turned out. it ‘feels’ really good now that the banking is implemented. it felt really light before but this sort of gave it a bit of weight, IMO. thoughts? the bank angle is fairly large (45 degrees) just to show what its like. its harder to spot at a lower value with nothing to compare to.

yep cheers for that. the way i have programmed it, some of those values are irrelevant. i did not want the camera being too fiddly, so it works out where it needs to be/how much it needs to rotate/move etc on its own, by checking how long, wide and high the players spaceship is.

these are the values the navigation class pulls from the players equipped engine…right now the values are hard coded in, but i’ll change it so it reads the equipped engine once all this is done…:

(ignore the /100’s. some values need to be scaled down - the players speed is actually capped at 0.1 in game, and it moves as fast as it does… but, for scripting/modding purposes (when it comes time to that ), it’ll make more sense to put ‘100’)

yeah mate i am. do not expect to see too much in the next few weeks or so though. i am working on it but i am working on back end stuff! i wont be able to show case much. to put it simply, i am working on items and inventory. first up will be engines, as that will link in nicely with what i have already. once i have engine ‘items’ working in the players inventory (to the point where he can store in inventory, buy from shop, sell to shop, or equip to ship) i can easily expand this to weapons, shields, turrets and anything else that can be equipped really.

currently i am also a little bit busy searching for a job. i live at home and have no income, so i have to jump through several loops to receive pay outs from the government till i get a job lol. ahh, melbourne…

just an update to say there is no update but i have not forgotten or anything. gah! someone find me a job! a lot harder to do than i thought…hey…

also i am working on getting my provisional license…dad bought me a car so thats awesome, just need the license!!

soo…very hectic life right now, despite leaving uni for the rest of the year. hopefully i can settle down sooooooonnn i want to get working on this