Arsonide's Forum Posts

  • Hit a snag doing the power subsystems in the ship - you can see the tile based solution we were trying before in the last screencap of the ship interior. I think I've found a good solution now. Here's a quick screencap of the testbed application for our new freeform power system:

    <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/89f0c9d3-9b3e-4e49-9e20-e91aa0f8d5dd/2010-08-20_0555.png">

    Wires were created at runtime, and are draggable. Movie Time!

  • We're still alive. Making good progress. The list of changes is huge. Weather, detail objects, main menu, ship interiors, ship internal systems (power, navigation, etc), space stations with a nifty docking animation, etc... The next release won't be coming until ship internals are complete, inventory is added, and all interiors are at least generated. (Caves, Buildings on planets, and space stations.) Here's some pictures.

    Inside the ship...

    On a lava world...

    On a jungle planet...

  • We are currently using one layout for space, one layout for planet surfaces, one layout for interior generation, and a main menu layout.

    EDIT: I needed a break with all the ship stuff. I made some progress on it today, but I decided to implement weather. Rain, Snow, and Ash Storms are implemented and persistent. Some planets are more prone to storms than others. Tomorrow I'll plow ahead on the ship stuff a bit more and implement moons around planets and space stations in deep space sectors.

    Oh and I also added a main menu that lets you spawn where you want in any universe you want: http://screencast.com/t/MzYwMTMyOGU

    Till next time gents.

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  • Made a little video showing progress, a little bit about where we're going with it, etc. I used my best pilot voice. "Attention passengers, we will be experiencing mild turbulence for the next five minutes or so. Please remain seated."

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  • As promised, a couple of ships from the current iteration of my ship generator, none touched by hand: Ship Number One, Ship Number Two, and my personal favorite, Ship Number Three (I swear. I didn't touch it!):

    <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/d36e3a9a-9997-4bca-ba04-749e9e69c3a7/2010-08-10_0142.png">

  • May I suggest a random name generator, to generate star system and/or planet names?

    Check the last link I posted, up in the top left you'll see I'm on planet "Apyor 6", which I've changed to roman numerals "Apyor VI". Now when you click planets, the ship computer (text to speech object), will say the name of the planet, and a few details about it, like population, moons, type, size, etc.

    But my big project right now is coming up with this system to randomly generate ship interiors. It will be used both for the player ship (you should be able to walk around your ship as you fly it), and when boarding enemy ships, or derelict vessels:

    <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/2fc3b7b4-616f-45af-8011-9b8e4e750509/2010-08-09_0045.png"> <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/c5d125ff-54f6-4d8c-a24a-404a03ad7a8e/2010-08-09_0046.png">

    I made branches symmetrical so they don't have that "deflated testicle" look anymore. I've already changed this to generate an actual tilemap, with walls and stuff. I'll probably have a workable version up tonight and post a screenshot.

    The more I think about the system I've used, the more excited I get about it. I am fairly sure I could modify it to generate spacestation interiors and buildings and dungeons on planets!

  • The next build I release publically is going to have objects on the planets, varying planet sizes, alien life, weaponry, and very rarely ruins with alien artifacts in them, which may be sold at space stations that will spawn in deep space for money. The money will be worthless at the time of that release, but at least the whole thing will have a "point".

    I estimate all of that will be a few weeks from now. Maybe less. I have a vacation coming up this week but you know...Quakecon.

    EDIT: Ok, perhaps a bit sooner than that...

    It's funny. I didn't tell my artist what I added, I just told him it was a surprise update and to go check out the planets. Well the aliens spawn out of the damn trees, and he's been working in a barren universe for a while, so he pretty much wet his pants when the first one attacked him.

    "Hey what's that red bar on the UI?" "I dunno must be a bug or something."

  • What you are looking at is simply the ground texture layer. There will be an object detail layer on top of it filled with rocks and trees and stuff. I was trying to figure out a way to do that layer without resorting to a tilemap, array, or perlin noise, and I think I've come up with something. I'm off work today and that is actually what is next on the list.

    The reason I avoided those three things was because they would contribute to that "randomly generated look" mentioned earlier in the thread.

  • There is actually no bumpmapping yet, but there will be, and the direction and strength of the lighting will be dependent on orbital position.

    My custom plugin handles the generation of the universe, and I link Construct to it using a series of expressions.

  • Well, my artist is a fan of realism, and I originally had stars everywhere, so we tuned it back a bit. Just keep in mind that that's a number somewhere in the code that I can tweak in about six seconds, but you probably will be satisfied with this star density once the game comes out. Most of our game is actually going to occur within your ship as it is flying through space. Also, those empty sectors are going to be filled with anomalies.

    The seed of the universe you are all playing in is 1337. If I change that to 1338, you will be playing in a totally different universe. When the game is released, the seed will change at random behind the scenes every time you start a new game.

  • I've had this little pet project for a long time. It started out a long time ago as a text based console program. It generates an entire universe from a number. The only thing that is stored is the number, everything else is generated on the fly. Without the constraints of RAM or hard drive space, the universe is effectively infinite. There isn't too much to do yet, but I wanted to show a little demonstration of its current state to show off the capabilities of Construct. I am honestly quite impressed that it hasn't died yet under this kind of strain.

    I have to release this in EXE form, not CAP, as I use special custom plugins. All the information you need to explore the universe is in the readme file included in the zip.

    http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 3797781698

    EDIT: Blegh, I forgot to add to the readme one of the keys. On a planetary surface, if you hold the right mouse button, your view will zoom out to map mode to see my perlin noise at work a bit better.

  • Construct has no limits, it is extensible, so you can develop plugins for anything you need.

  • Been working on the Universe Generator. I've gotten to planets. I have a large canvas object, and I am attempting to use it as a mask to blend two other textures together. (It's a heightmap, trying to blend together two tiled textures of rock and grass.) Unfortunately the mask effect only works with alpha, and canvas does not export alpha.

    The heightmap is black and white. I was wondering if someone could whip up an effect that would utilize brightness/grayscale images to mask instead of the alpha channel. That would be awesome.

    OR if there is another way to do this, I'd love to hear that as well.

  • I dropped most of my development on Crooked because Python wasn't working at the time. If it was working, I'd probably pick it back up. Although, now that I know how to write a plugin, I could do most of my programmatic stuff in a plugin.

    My point is that people don't use Python because they aren't interested in using Python. They don't use it because it's broken, or because they believe it is broken. It's kind of a gray area.

  • I guess it's completed, I haven't received any complaints about it. Feel free to move it wherever you like.

    I saw someone in Construct's chat talking about Unity 3D, and went to go check that out, and am now happily addicted to everything about it. I've already implemented several very important features of my space game in it including crafting, inventory, space movement in 3D, and power management - you can run wires around the ship to power each component of it. Unity even makes multiplayer of all things a simple affair. It is the perfect combination of a 3D Map Editor AND the actual power of real code (either JavaScript or C#). It has an large and active community due to the current iPhone game rush. It is quite simply the closest equivalent to Construct that there is in three dimensions, and I love it. It's like Construct and Ogre had a love child.

    That said, I will probably still do a dungeon plugin for Construct at some point, because I said I would, but it'll be on a slower timescale since I can only do so much. We're getting hammered at work cause of the upcoming holidays and I am spending most of my off-time splooging over Unity, because it is that awesome.

    If development on the plugin becomes so problematic that it starts taking a very long time, there is a premade library designed for roguelike games that I can quickly port into Construct for you guys, but first I would like to try and finish the algorithm I'm already working on. Meanwhile, yeah you guys can move this thread to the release forum, and I can mirror the plugin somewhere else if you want.