Exoterra - the fun space RTS

[Kyle]

Hi guys, I'm here to introduce my little project - a fun, flashy multiplayer space RTS!

Okay, right now, it's sort of only a fun, flashy multiplayer space RTS... game. But development is moving quickly, and I thought, why not introduce it now?



It's a lot of ships orbiting a planet at the moment. I'm planning on adding space stations and such soon, as well as that multiplayer I mentioned a couple times. I may also be working on this with a friend, but we're not sure yet. I'll post regular updates here, so everyone that's interested can follow the project.

Attached is a very early demo, showing off the basic control scheme. Right click and drag to orbit your view around the planet, and mouse wheel to change your orbit altitude. And try not to pick through my code, it's embarrassing!

[Germanunkol]

I like a lot how very "different" it feels. The scrolling up into every direction is pretty nice. Might be easy to loose track of where you are though, since you're using more of a circle-ish coordinate system rather than a Cartesian one.

You should make some of the space ships go the other way I think.

And the planets could look much better. Check out this awesome gimp tutorial: http://mygimptutorial.com/the-ultimate- ... t-tutorial
I think if you just change the planet this will look pretty awesome already.


Looking forward to more updates!!

[Kyle]

Thanks! The planet was really just a quick placeholder. In fact, it's Venus... recolored.

I was planning on adding a circular grid effect that might fade out the further you get from the planet, so you can tell where you are. I'm also planning on making the camera smoothly switch to zooming out if you get too far away, then transition to whatever body the planet is orbiting, but I don't have any transition code in place yet.

As for ships in retrograde orbit, I'm not sure yet. It might not make sense once stations and docking are implemented, but it may be necessary once I get orbit transfers working. Or I may just do a short-range warp drive for that, since it's going to take a while to transfer to a far away planet and some people might find that boring, me included.

It does need a starfield background for sure. I think I'll implement that now. I might also try normal mapped sprites to see what kind of effect that has. It might fulfill that "flashy" thing I mentioned!

[Kyle]

The new background helps a lot. It's easier to orient yourself. I think that once I add space stations, it'll be even easier because you'll have some slow moving reference points.

[retrotails]

I have another suggestion for your planets.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10283

[Kyle]

I have another suggestion for your planets.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10283

Probably not going to happen. Normal mapping should achieve a smoother look anyway. I'm not a big fan of 3D in an otherwise 2D game, sorry

[Kyle]

Slight change of plans here! No multiplayer. I think it'll be more fun that way, and it'll allow me to get the game out a LOT sooner.

I'm now working on the save system, so I can start adding actual game functionality. I'm using SQLite for the saves.

[Germanunkol]

Great decision to put in the save system before finishing all the fun stuff. Hats off to that!

SQL is also a great choice - but fill me in. Doesn't this choice require the user to install SQLite on their system when you want to distribute the game?
Edit: Never mind that last sentence. Found the discussion on this here.

[Kyle]

It'd be nice to have it built into LOVE so I don't have to build my own Linux and OS X versions, but alas, no one else seems to think SQLite is worth using. Even though it's a very mature piece of software, it seems people here would rather recreate the wheel. I'm using SQLite because I'm storing actual data, not just configuration settings. And I have a lot of data - potentially millions of stars and planets.

I need to redo orbiting and make orbits for planets deterministic so one could enter a system and find everything where it should be, not where it was the last time they were there...

And it turns out, adding the save system has prompted me to redo much of how I handled entity creation. I've created a nice little entity factory class to handle that for me. When I'm done, everything should be pretty seamless. I think I'll also rethink camera focus transitions... it'd perhaps be better if the camera panned to the station and then zoomed in when switching from planet view, rather than just snapping into a non-rotating zoomed in view.

I would also like to figure out my own arc function, so I can draw a nice radial UI rather than go with rectangles. I like circles, can you tell? That'd also introduce some really, really cool possibilities for the UI. For example, what if the planet interaction UI popped up as arcs lined up with the planet's edge? That'd be really cool.

It's a shame that love.graphics.arc doesn't easily allow for removing those ugly radii. I'd like to draw just the arc, thank you very much!

[Kyle]

Here's that arc with no radii function I mentioned:

Code: Select all

function arc_no_radii(cx, cy, radius, start, sweep, segments)
	local x,y = cx + math.cos(start) * radius, cy + -math.sin(start) * radius
	for i=1,segments do
		local angle = start + ((i / segments) * sweep)
		local nx, ny = cx + math.cos(angle) * radius, cy + -math.sin(angle) * radius

		love.graphics.line(x,y,nx,ny)
		x,y = nx,ny
	end
end