Stars reach

[User137]

Day or 2 ago i ended up with thought that each player has a mothership. That's what the camera will focus on, and that's what is used to populate new planets. With the time limits i might end up with just 1 type of combat ship and auto-combat. Toggled with limited amount of diplomacy.

[User137]

Another screenshot added. Solar system is generated for 10000 sectors, although not all of them are guaranteed to have a sun or planets. This is last screeny i can give out before starting adding UI elements, which will be nearing the final product... There are also 10 different planet textures in use, although the texture mapping is wobbly on the sphere for now. Maybe i could generate the sphere myself, instead of relying on model file. Would at least get the coords right.

I had a setback with fonts. Installed some free scifi front from Internet but only Gimp can use it TCanvas and MsPaint can't use. I could create buttons with Gimp but i can't make the font map for all texts.

edit: Added another picture from UI work in progress.

Hoping to add warp drive soon. Starmap is working, and i will use it to open sector view. From there player can open warp rift and send selected ships there. This is done by clicking any point in the sector, meaning that he can precisely decide how far or which side of the planet you want to come out from. Textures for all warp related are already done.

Still, there are a few unsolved issues in the design of this game that i hope can come to conclusion.

[User137]

Here's a little teaser of what's it like:

[paul_nicholls]

Neato! Keep up the great work dude!

[Eric]

Nice start!

What's the gameplay genre going to be?

[de_jean_7777]

That looks great.

[Ñuño Martínez]

So, you move the camera around the vessel to look at the direction you want to go and then press a button to change the ship's route, isn't it?

[User137]

Yeah, it moves forward to camera direction with W key... or that's how it works right now. Not sure if i'll remain like that after i've added more ships to player control. I might do a bounding box selection and right click move order. That would need little further zoom. Also, i did notice in the video that camera looks very rough, and can be smoothened by using a destination turn angle and then animate the rotation.

edit: Then in the vid you saw how i set warp destination, and the button suddenly became enabled. This mode of flying will be fully automated and not interruptible with player controls.

But that's still little open design, because combat ships might, and most likely will, be fully automated. With this i wouldn't actually need to select ships. I was thinking that only purpose of shipyard would be to assign current sector ships to either planet defence, or join the player fleet.

Didn't show well in the video, but starmap highlighted the current star system, and warp destination... because... you want to know where you are

The planets have a type, which was also slightly seen in the vid. There are 10 types, from which 4 don't support life, and rest will be classed in different quality which will determine building rate of new ships for player disposal. For example a desert and ocean planets are still feasible, but not optimal for industry.