Movement…Again

So I spent the last little while doing more movement stuff. Adjusting the areas that it lets you move, changing how it handles rotation, that sort of stuff. I really think I’ve got it this time, but then I’ve said that before.

I swear, once this is done it will be a very long time before I attempt something with a control scheme this weird. And an even longer time before I do something that requires so many physics calculations. Having things run into each other is fine, that’s all handled by the Unity physics engine. But anything where I have to calculate what is going to happen in the physics engine so that I can have an AI plan ahead, or give the player advanced feedback, forget it. Hopefully next week I’ll be back to writing dialog.

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More Dialog

Expect to see a lot of posts with this title. I’ve been writing dialog, and fixing bugs that occurred during the scripting of the first level. The first level seems to work reasonably well, at least until other people use it I’m sure. I’m moving on to other levels and writing the dialog that takes place between the missions. It’s fun to start to see the story aspect of the game really take shape.

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Story Research

I’ve been writing dialogue, and let me tell you it’s pretty rough. It’s going to need a good bit of polish before it’s ready, but at least I’m getting it out there. I’ve also been fixing a lot of bugs, these are legitimately connected to my attempts to write dialogue. I’ve also been doing some research for the story. It’s turning into a convoluted, messy, overambitious thing. But to be honest that’s exactly the way I like it, and I’m more excited about the game lately than I have been for a long while.

The story pulls from the story of the Garden of Eden, as well as other similar religious traditions that focus on the same sort of themes. I’ve really been enjoying doing some research into some of the related stories, it’s been very very interesting. The story feels pretty ambitious, I’m just hoping that I can do it justice.

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More bugs, and a realization

More bugs, you know the drill. Nothing too exciting or interesting. A little more work on the tutorials, should be super simple, and still give the basics of what’s needed to get around in the game.

Now, I promised a realization. I sat down with the intention to create a level or two, and possibly fill in some dialogue sections between the missions. I found myself feeling a bit nervous about it, the feeling that no matter what I do with the missions it’s going to come out wrong. Technical stuff is relatively easy, no matter how bad the physics or deep a bug may lie, there is still basically a right answer. The story and mission stuff, the content, is a lot more subjective. So, as I tried to focus on making some content I felt this peculiar pressure, almost like you might feel if you were to stick your head out your car window on the freeway and try to keep your eyes wide open while facing forward. There was this overwhelming desire to look away. And then, what do you know, I’ve got some bugs to fix, some UI that needs adjusting, something else that must be done before I can work on the content.

I’ve noticed that this is a bit of a pattern with me. I’ve always been more than happy to play around with the technical aspect of whatever tools I’m using, and avoided the actual making of stuff. I always find something the tool doesn’t do or something I need to explore before I can properly create the masterwork I have in mind. Even ZZT, which was an ascii based adventure game creator thing, it was fairly powerful, and I played lots of other people’s creations, and marveled at how neat they were. But every time I started wanting to create something I found myself hung up on something that I wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. And again my creative ambitions were held up while I messed with the technical aspect. And I was only something like 12 years old at the time.

Whew, so that’s probably more information than you ever wanted to know. The point is, I find myself wondering why the game isn’t out yet. It’s certainly been long enough. It feels like one of those dreams where you’re trying to run, but something is pulling you backwards, and you grab at the grass, or nearby trees or fences to try to pull yourself forward. I think this is it though, this is why the game isn’t out yet. I’m not entirely sure what to do, but I’m thinking I need to sit down and just make several levels and dialogues, the whole bit, and focus only on that. Perhaps I will have something interesting to show in a couple of days.

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Reworked Tutorial

NewTutorialI worked tonight on fixing the tutorial. Previously I would give several pages of tutorial explaining movement, momentum, pausing and resuming, all sorts of stuff. But I noticed that whenever I would show it to people they would start to read the first paragraph, then just skip through the rest because there was way too much text. When that would happen I would instruct them to exit the tutorial level and open a combat level. Then I would point out three things: Click and drag the green circle to move the waypoint. Click on the plus sign to add new waypoints. Click the play button to have your ships start moving, click it again to pause your ships.

With those instructions most people were able to start moving and figure things out, and in fact, most of them didn’t even need to be told how to add waypoints. So I decided that I would simplify the in game tutorial to three or four very short paragraphs. So I spent the evening laying the groundwork to show the simple tutorial messages. I think it will really help, but it’s still irritating how much time it can take just to set things up so you can show and hide the tutorial at the right times.

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A fight with a big nasty bug

Ugh, not much to talk about today (yet I still somehow generated more than 500 words), and nothing to show. I changed the way lasers work so that they do more damage the longer they stay on a target. This was done for two reasons, first the lasers didn’t really provide a real tactical difference from guns. Sure, the guns did more damage, and had a shorter range, and were a bit better against shields, but they were both basically weapons that you got close enough and just keep the enemy in range. They didn’t really encourage different behaviors the way the missiles do.

So you want to keep the lasers on a single target for as long as possible. Which makes things a bit more interesting. Another thing they allow is a new special ability I’m going to add. You’ll be able to drop satellites that will act as conduits for your lasers. Get withing range of your laser satellite, then anything that’s within its range is within you range. Where this will really shine is when you set up multiple laser relays within each range of each other. Suppose that you set up the relays along a route that you expect the enemy to take. No you can keep them in range the whole time, which allows your laser to target a single ship longer, and do maximum damage.

So that really wasn’t too bad. Then when I tried to test it I ran into some bugs that had cropped up due to some changes that I had made in the interface. Those weren’t too bad, but I also ran into a problem where my ships weren’t responding to clicks. I tie into the NGUI event system to have the ships respond to mouse clicks, and for some reason it just wasn’t working. I finally figured out that I had two colliders, the ship, then a background collider that would catch mouse clicks and movement and turn them into map movements. The background collider was set behind the ship colliders which is what let it work before.

I finally discovered that since neither the ships nor the background had any sort of NGUI scripts attached to them, they were both treated as though they were at the same depth. Which meant that the background intercepted the click meant for the ship. Fortunately NGUI includes the code when you buy it, otherwise I never would have found out what was going on. Also it let me create a fix. To see if you clicked on anything it runs a ray from the camera into the world, and sees if it collides with anything. It then sorts all of the collisions by depth and gives the even to the highest object. Since everything was at the same depth it would give it to the first thing the ray hit, which was always the background for some reason. So I modified the sorter so that if two objects are at the same NGUI depth, then it sorts them based on which object is at a deeper world coordinate depth. Problem solved. Still pretty annoying how much time it took.

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Colored Frame

Hazduhr suggested in the comments section using colored frames to differentiate the component slots, sort of like is done in Mechwarrior 4. So I took a look at it. At first I just went with a solid square frame around the component, but it looked, kind of unpolished. So I tried making some frames for them. I like it a little more, but it still needs some work. Here’s what it looks like with the frames:

ColoredFrames0I think that there is too much blue in the frames. The red components look a bit like candy canes. I’m thinking that if I shrink the blue portions, or maybe make the blue parts the corners, and again make them small that might help. Anyway, I think that once I add some colored frames to the components themselves it’s going to be much simpler for people to figure out where they can put things.

Thanks again for the suggestion Hazduhr.

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More UI, it never ends

So I haven’t posted daily updates, because it’s all been behind the scenes bug fixing. Incredibly boring, but I should have realized that that’s what a lot of it would be. I don’t think anyone wants to read updates like: “Fixed weird bug causing interface to invert itself” or “Solved problem causing text alignment to be off by five pixels.” Those are the kinds of things you type into subversion commit comments. Perhaps those would make good tweets? What if there was a subversion plug in that would automatically post your subversion commit comments to twitter? It may not be interesting, but it would probably double the number of tweets I have in just a week or two.

Anyway, tonight I have for you two updates. The first is yet another update to the ship equip screen.

ShipEquip

You’ll notice that there is actually a space ship in this screenshot. You will also notice that there are strange shapes on the mount points. It was difficult for people to figure out where the components could or couldn’t go. So I made the shapes correlate to the type of component. Squares are weapons, triangles are engines, pentagons are everything else. At this point the mount points on the ship are following the shape rules, but the components themselves aren’t. It’s going to be some work to update all of the components and generate some good icons for them.

The next screenshot shows a very basic conversation going on. The whole reason for all of this UI update stuff was to allow this to work. Basically it shows conversations, allows the user to make decisions, and allows me to show backgrounds and portraits for speakers on the left and right. Hopefully this won’t be too much of a strain on the art department. But we’ll see. It doesn’t look like much here, but it looks better in action.

BasicDialogue

 

 

 

 

 

As for what’s next? I think I’m going to do something other than UI, because I’m sick of it. Not sure yet what it will be.

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More UI Work

More of the UI stuff. I redesigned the ship shop interface, I’m still working on it, but I’m thinking it’s going to be a massive improvement. What once took four or five submenus is going to all be taken care of on a single screen. Here is what the interface used to look like:

OriginalShipShop

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s the redesign:

NewShipShop

 

 

 

 

 

 

Way better. I’m hoping to get the interface completely functional tomorrow. But we’ll see.

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Basic UI Stuff

It’s take a fair amount of work for very little to show. I’ve been learning the new version of NGUI, a UI package for Unity3D. I’ve also been restructuring my old UI code. So here’s what little I have to show for it:

Here’s the old skirmish time controls:

TimeInterfacePlayAnd here’s the new ones:

NewSkirmishTimeControlTomorrow I’m hoping to overhaul the ship equipment screen, condensing four or five separate interfaces into one.

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