writer's block?

I found a few websites for existing space combat games. There are plenty of screenshots and feature lists that can be used for ideas/inspritation etc.

Vendetta Online
Jumpgate Evolution
Pirate Galaxy

Character and Ship Progress

Nearly finished my texture for junkdog have also been modeling my character so i've been bouncing between the two of them

Ship Envy

This week i started working on a couple more ship ideas fo my race so far i have built a capital ship and some kind of bording craft that will dock onto enemy stations or something and i have also been working on another fighter design that isnt quite finished yet. enjoy

User Interface and The Workshop

Short post from me:

Graham, I believe you have the compas in Torque 3D; would you like to better adapt the resource to Andrew's UI compas?

The ship customisation UI, now called 'The Workshop' is what we will use to customise ships with parts; although it has not been fully created, the basic workings are there. Will and I set up the rough idea on Tuesday (with the awesome cert 3 oaf behind us telling us what he thought we should do). /drool to that guy.

The Workshop is set up with a 3d view of the thing you are changing, and a right hand pane with <> signs on all thing you can alter. (boosters, jets, primary weapons, secondary weapons for now). Below these are the ship details (what parts are currently being used and what the statistics of the ship are (because a massive engine would add mass, and give more speed etc).

Currently the only options are visual ones as the variables for speed, roll, etc on our flight vehicles are not alterable yet (expect this to change within the next week).

Additionally we will add many of the discussed ideas to the customisation - cloaking, shield generators etc. These will be upgradable via The Workshop.

HUD progress as of 4.40 26/08

Here is what I've got so far for the HUD, if anything else is required let me know. I've slightly changed the design as I've gone along at suggestion by class mates and Tim.

I've given the horizon and vertical bars extra length just in case it will make it easier for you programmers to use. I'm not sure about how the compass letters are rotated, if it looks wrong to other people it's easily changed, as are colour swaps.

As you can see from the weapons bar (bottom right) I've put in temp values and images so you can get the feel of it. The words on the top bar will highlight when activated, as seen in this image on the "engines" icon. The "!missile lock!" and the warning bar/lights below will light up/flash when a missile is locked onto the player NOT locked onto the enemy.

Also included are possible enemy and friendly icons if there aren't any already made, though once a faction logo has been chosen maybe it would be cool to use the logos for the friendly/enemy icons, depending on the logo designs that is.

Comments appreciated.

Progress?

akAs i now have a working flying space ship thanks to nick and will i can test the ai flight combat and fingers crossed we can get some homing missiles working :)

I have also come across a resource that may be of help. This has armor piercing rounds (possibly for weapons that bypass the shield),
timed explosives for timed mines or other weapons
Decal wrapping for blood splatter or bullet holes, hull breaches etc.
and a gore switch in case the game became too scary for little kids haha

I shall give this resource a go and hopefully be able to implement it into our game!

the resource is http://www.garagegames.com/community/resource/view/14044/

The Final on Features

From discussion today we've picked up that people would like..

• Directional Shielding
• Power Diversion (being able to distribute a % of overall power to a ship component)
• Energy weapons
• Deflection of Projectiles

These are in addition to the planned..

• Seeking missiles
• Mines
• Targetting system

We will limit the amount of features to implement for now; if there are any suggestions however, they are of course welcome. We simply need to rationalize.

We will be able to release a battlefield mini-game (the flight-combat arc of the game). Then we can get down to the character side of things and make some fast progress :)

2 weeks prior to the presentation we will finish documentation and 1 week prior, we will get everything in order. We are currently 6 weeks from the flight combat deadline; and 13 from the presentation.

Today I had a fun time messing with vertical lasers! .. and then blowing myself up with them.. calibrating data in script, however menial a task; can be time consuming; this will be included when filling out the documentation and tracking.

gotta love greeble :-D

too bad poly count gose from 20,000 to 160,000 (whole scene)

Hud design - Textless

UPDATE 12.21pm
Will be re-creating once I've settled on a design, if anyone has any additional things they'd like included in the HUD let me know and I'll see what I can do.

PLANETS

Planet textures, rough HUD design, Alien update, and ship weaponary

Here are some images I've been working on Merry Christmas

Planets

Game Space

The general idea is that we have an area that envelopes the proximity of a planet, meteor belt or other important place. The major areas you may access will be available on a star-map (based on proximity etc with distance and all). We don't want to have to cruise through space for a few thousand years to get to a nearby planet :)














This here is just a screenshot of the protoship from earlier with some particle effects for contrail. The planet to the right is quite far away and as you can see the clouds are low res (low res textures on large objects becomes a pain :/)

We've got enough to start putting content in and it wouldn't take much to get a combat-simulation up (this would take some calibration, as when dealing with 3d space and projectiles... we want to be able to hit each other).

Will and I have been messing around with this stuff every now and then. May have to look into .ifls (not sure how they work in Torque exactly). As for art stuffs, if anyone wants to add complexity to their planets; such as glow, city lights etc.. clouds and all; just talk - would love some space port / battleship .. even a destroyed one, with lots of bits (so we can have them float around it) "space junk!".

I will post an update when ive got more to say. Til then, great work everyone :)

Post #3

I've been working on a character selection screen and an account login system.
These resources have been helpful for the login system:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/11552
http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/7605

It's working, but it's all happening on the client side. So i'll have to change a few things to get it working in a proper client-server manner.

quick post

ported over torque master server from these resources to c++.
http://www.garagegames.com/community/resource/view/5962/
http://www.garagegames.com/community/resource/view/14666/

modified Torque TCPObjects to send and recieve more than just text.

Planets

More Planets

i have made 3 planets and 1 moon they are all 1024 X 1024

Characters and Planets

Here is an updated version of my Character I've been working on, going for a kinda hard tough leather look for the skin (bit like elephant skin) also we had an exercise to do the other week of crossing an animal with a human I done a frog-man and built him/it in 3D included some pics incase you might want to use him for SuperNova space game.

There are also 5 planets included incase you might want to use them for SuperNova space game the maps and bumps maps are posted as well