Mouse movement

[Krešimir Špes]

here's a thought, what if you could, aside from using the keyboard to rotate the ship, rotate with a mouse . eg, press a toggle key or hold while using this feature;

[Major Diarr]

It might be useful for the small fast ships with narrow firing arcs, does the game in general lend itself to that style of play, though?

How did you come up with that feature?

[Krešimir Špes]

yep, the game is a medium-fast arcade style;

How? It just hit me while I was thinking how to organise netcode.

[Krešimir Špes]

basically, you would have one vector and the ship would always turn towards it. so, even if a collision occours, the ship will correct it's trajectory.

netwise, it's much better

gameplay wise, it's much easier to control the ship. and you would still have the ability to control the ship with the keyboard which would just rotate that vector left or right.

[Cruis.In]

clicking on an area on the screen like starfleet command?

or the ship rotating as you move your mouse over to the left or right side of the ship?

[Krešimir Špes]

the latter.

I made an svn branch of the current code and tried implementing a basic version. looks promising

[Major Diarr]

As long as I don't have to hold something down not to use it, I don't care if it's in.

[Cruis.In]

couldn't find it, which file contains the input code?

[Major Diarr]

I just realized that this behind the scenes method of vector control will allow my old idea for Borg cube and sphere movement. The idea is that instead of rotating the ship's vector using the A or D keys, you change the vector directly by pressing the buttons in the direction you want to go, which accelerates the ship in that direction. For instance, pressing the S button accelerates the ship South, if the ship has Northward velocity it will reduce that velocity eventually making the ship move South. If there is any Eastward movement, that won't be adjusted at all, unless the A key (West movement) is pressed. It would also work really well with mouse control. How does that sound?

[Cruis.In]

that makes it basically move like old starflight 3.

right now in my simulation if your pressing down while your going forward it eventually goes backwards heh.

but i guess you mean for A and D as well.

the mouse idea sounds interesting, ill put it in to try it eheh,

[Cruis.In]

for the love of monhinder, could we have a general forum?

major, where could i find someone to do some 2d art for my interface etc etc? could you post an ad somewhere/s you know with my info?

[Major Diarr]

We do have a general forum, it's those random posts two pages back.

Sign up at http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/ and make a post in the Project Recruitment area. Make sure you show examples so people know your project is real.

Does this mean you're working on your own game and not TNZ2?

[Cruis.In]

maybe we need a thread called major cruis spes rubbish thread

As for right now, the code for tnz2 is kind of at a rabble rabble stage and I think he mentioned he is working on documenting it. Ive got my own code done so that you know what each source file is for and what code it is likely to contain, just by there naming convention. So that needs doing for tnz2 first.

As for my thing, yeah I am working on it. Originally I intended it as a multiplayer skirmish along the lines of tnz2, and similar to subspace/continuum. but star trek style and movement. Multiplayer stuff befuddled my brain, so I decided to move towards a single player experience, AI befuddled my brain. However, I'm at the point now where I am past the befuddling, however, it'll still take time to have a smart AI and an active universe.

Also I can understand multiplayer and AI and since reaching this level of understanding I want to do it. But the ideas I have for the single player simulation are more appealing to me right now and I do not want to divert off that goal to do the multiplayer stuff.

For single player I intend to have things such as

- interaction between you and your crew or someone who speaks for the crew, havent decided how far to go with it.
- Dialogue and conversation between you and any 'main' race ship you encounter.
- RPG elements where by your crew gains experience.

I do this with the hope of immersion, the more I can do to get a player to suspend belief through clever interaction with a chatty AI, the more fun it will be. And the more "alive" the world you are in will feel.

Right now the short term goals are making sure what is there right now both on top and underneath, works properly and finishing what is there that was left unfinished. And finding a graphics guy to complete the present interface with nice shiny appealing graphics, and move onto phase 2 of the interface, which is to enable you to have more indepth control of your ship and systems, be unobstusive and only present when you want it to be, think of it like opening a book and flipping the pages and then closing the book and putting it away.

Right now I need to decide what I want the player to be able to control or manage, which in the end determines just how many pages this "book" will have for you to flip through, and it makes no sense starting the code of phase two until this visualization process is done.

Tthe actual coding, once all that planning and visualizing is done is nothing compared to the conceptual stage.

[Krešimir Špes]

yep, I'm doing extensive code cleanup and documentation while others are working an a few smaller features.

Cruis.In, don't make the same mistake I made: if you want multiplayer in your game, start implementing it early and wrap everything in a server-client architecture or don't do multiplayer at all. Trust me, when you start implementing multiplayer at the end, all you're gonna realize is that you have to rewrite the project..

[Cruis.In]

don't know why this was worth building, but probably because I had more fun than I should have with the AI. HEHEH even at this basic crappy stage his stuff that I had put in from before came back to haunt/surprise me.

While testing some stuff and clearing the way for better AI and going through my old AI source, as I was fighting against him, he would flee when his shields were damaged enough, and then the little bastard cloaked on me eventually.
Needless to say I had a running battle with him, whereby I was shooting an invincible ship because i had disabled hull collision, and he was hurting my forward shield, even after all the re routing of power.

this one has the game.exe sounds folder and graphics folder all in demo folder like last time. so you can just un rar to your desktop and it will go to

demo >

sounds dir contains one new sound file
same with the graphics dir, so you can just move them over the old directories and it'll add those files in. then just copy the game.exe and replace the other one.

ive done it so if u unrar it to the exact location you unrared the last one, it'll do everything automatic since, the directory structures were kept.