After reading up on lerp, wouldn't that mean stopping a ship and having it turn and fire? I figure that would make the AI seem more controlled than it already is.

Unless you had another idea in mind.

This is something I've been trying to do for several weeks now. For those who have never played SPAZ or seen the main menu, I've created a recording of it below:

[TUBE]Da17jAE6zb0[/TUBE]

The way the AI ships move around and fire at each other looks just so fluid. I've been trying to capture this same look, but I just can't seem to get it right.

Here's what I have so far:

• Several 'atmosphere' layers for the background. These move at different speeds and create a subtle dynamic that is barely noticeable to prevent the user from thinking the background is stagnant.
• AI ships are physics operated. Basically the Ai ships will seek out the player ship until they come within a certain range, and then they will reverse acceleration to give the impression of kiting and strafing (prevents 'dumb' AI that simply flies toward the player ship at all times).
• The player ship turns and seeks out the closest enemy ship and flies toward it until it gets within a certain range, then it reverses acceleration (just like the enemy ships) to give the impression of strafing.
• Both AI and the player ship use the turret behavior and will only fire if in range.

Unlike SPAZ, which features several ships randomly flying around and fighting each other, I was hoping to have a main menu featuring the player ship flying around and taking on enemy ships. Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve my main menu? Particular troubles I'm having are:

• How do I keep the player ship on screen for most of the time? It seems to fly off-screen a lot because I'm not sure how to create an invisible boundary that would cause it (and the enemy ships) to reverse accelerate away from it.
• Fluidity. The way the AI ships move in the SPAZ main menu is fast and very fluid, whereas mine looks very controlled (because it is). Any ideas on how to make my implementation more fluid? I'm not sure how I would code in dynamic ship stops and sudden direction changes like in SPAZ

This .capx is huge and not for those new to C2. This may be too big of a question to ask on this specific forum, but I've been beating my head for a few weeks now wondering how the creators of SPAZ did it. Any tips/suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

Icarus.capx

The 'log' action seems interesting, but it feels painful to log lots of actions in this way when a step-through debugger could be used.

I've definitely looked through the updates since the last time I touched C2 and the line-of-sight behavior definitely seems the most interesting at this point.

Bookmarking seems like a great way to mark aspects of the project as 'to-dos' for later or for marking certain sections as potential causes for a bug that's going on.

I am mainly seeking an official developer response on any sort of debugger progress.

It's been two months since I last touched C2 (took a break after a tornado hit my house in May) and even though I've saved my developer notes on my projects, opening them up and trying to get started on fixing bugs I noted two months ago is incredibly painful.

My case may be somewhat of a special one, but I do recall a poll several months ago asking what feature users wanted most. Debugger may not have made #1 but it definitely is a feature C2 needs. Is there any word on any sort of progress on this?

It would definitely help us get our programs running faster :D

Dave Hailwood

Thank you for the kind and wonderful comments! I'm not sure where I want to take my game next. I live in Oklahoma, and we were hit by an EF5 tornado this Monday that wrecked my neighborhood. My house is still mostly intact, but we can't drink the water here and electricity is expected to be out for the next couple of weeks.

As for my space shooter, I want to put it off until multiplayer support is better in C2. I understand there are some plugins to make realtime multiplayer work, but for now I have my sights on developing a turn-based strategy game that takes place on a board, so you may be hearing from me soon with some questions about implementation ;)

farflamex

I have to agree with your analysis of Newgrounds. I have received several 0 votes for submitting "just another asteroid shooter" when another asteroid shooter placed in the top 8.

Overall, I'm not really a fan of the NG community as much more than a place to get basic feedback on a game. The community is largely full of kids who do not provide the sort of feedback we could really use to make our games better.

Dave Hailwood

Thanks for the heads up! I've changed my tags appropriately :)

I'm in. Telecollaborating with Tobye and an artist from Australia!

Does low screen size can boost FPS?

Low screen size by itself does not boost FPS.

It's the same as having a high-end GPU render on a 11-inch monitor at 1440x900. The results will most likely be good because the resolution to graphics power ratio is low.

I tried uploading this live, but now I get a black screen :(

Icarus Test

Now that my NG game jam submission is 'done', I'm going to move on to turning my space shooter into a full game. The first thing I'm working on is getting my title screen right (the 'game' itself is disabled so don't worry about the gameplay not working).

If anyone has experience with creating spaceship AI, I would like to talk to you.

I'll actively update this thread as I slowly develop my title screen.

First problem: How do I confine the player ship and enemy ships so they don't fly too far off the screen?

Icarus.capx

Red on the title menu (using setcolor, so you won't see it on IE). Other colours if you visit different planets (e.g green at the green gas giants). If you want it to show up in different colours on all browsers without using Setcolor, I guess you'd have to have different coloured versions done in a paint package.

Where is setcolor?