I'm Doing Computer Science and I'm Still Alive

Nearly Christmas: Christmas means free time, free time means Spaceships. I'm going to look at adding multiplayer support in the next few weeks, after which I may have an alpha release ready. Hell, I could probably sell an incredibly buggy alpha release and make 5 million dollars, right?

EWAR Cruiser Demo

The EWAR Cruiser has an advanced electronic warfare suite, capable of masking the position of friendly craft or suppressing decoys produced by enemy EWAR cruisers. However, an EWAR craft cannot produce decoys of itself, or of another EWAR cruiser, since this would cause a feedback loop in the detection suite and overload the instruments.

Nonetheless, the EWAR cruiser can be a powerful tool in a combined strike against enemy craft, masking bombers to protect them from incoming interceptors, or masking interceptors to make them harder to avoid.

Beam Destroyer Demo

The Beam Destroyer is the main anti-destroyer ship. It has the most powerful ship-mounted weapon in space - an electric arc beam generator - capable of tearing through ship armour with ease. However, the design of the beam generator requires it be on a fixed armature, so the entire ship must rotate in order to line up targets, making the Beam Destroyer powerful but very slow to aquire targets.



This is also the first fully-shaded video to be put up. I might go back and update the older videos to use the shaders but I would kind of like to keep track of any progression in the game visible - you can also see in the various videos the fleet editor becoming more advanced.

Beam Ship Screenshot

The next major addition to the Programmable Spaceships fleet - the Beam Destroyer - is coming along nicely. I don't want to upload a video until I can get it shaded (current PC has rubbishy graphics card) but here's a non-shaded image to be getting on  with.

There are some extra effects on top of what is displayed here which you'll see in the video when I get it made and uploaded. That crazy-looking beam at the top is two beam ships shooting each other at the same time, in case you were wondering.

Interceptor Video

That's right! Another new video already! This demo shows a new ship type - the interceptor. The interceptor is fast & agile, and is designed for taking down bombers & heavy missiles. The interceptor has a rapid-fire but low range gatling laser as its armament.

New Video

I finally got around to getting a new video together. It shows the new skirmish/local match screen, a bit of code, and spaceships shooting missiles at each other. I'm hoping to get more videos showing the special abilities of each ship class together as I get them finished, so watch this space.

An Update

I'm a little behind schedule due to a busy weekend and I'm not likely to get any less busy in the next few days. However, I should be able to get a video of the fleet designer, the skirmish screen and some more combat (still just the same ships though) within the next day or so.

The Fleet Editor

The Fleet Editor is coming along nicely, so far allowing you to place, move and rotate ships. Once you save the fleet, the ships in the fleet are centered in the layout to aid positioning in games, so for example if you place all your ships in a vertical line on the right hand side of the layout, they'll end up in a vertical line in the middle of the layout.
Quite a lot of today was spent optimising the UI rendering. There's still some work to be done here but I've managed to drastically improve the performance of UI controls involving clipping such as the fleet selector and, less interestingly, buttons.
I'm planning to get a video showing a fleet being created and pitted against another in a 'skirmish' style game at some point this weekend but so far there's no skirmish screen so I'll need to get that done first. However, some screenshots of a fleet being designed, and of the fleet selector.

A fleet being edited in the Fleet Editor

The same fleet being viewed in the Fleet Selector

Fleet Positions

I'm currently working on the Fleet Editor, which allows you to position the ships in your fleet and select/edit the programs they run. This has led me to think about the positions of fleets during an engagement. The obvious positions have both fleets facing off against each other, but assuming one of the fleets has done some sort of warp towards the other, what's the chance that this would 'really' happen?

Ships facing off

Fleets randomly positioned

Now I'm not looking to really make a super realistic game but having random position engagements (like in many RTS games, where your starting structures/units are put in a random spot on the map) might be interesting - it would make randomly firing ahead of you when the engagement starts less effective, and would greatly reward intelligent flak, shield and interceptor positioning.

A cleverly deployed (blue) fleet
versus a not-so-smart (red) fleet

Welcome!

I'm working on a game titled 'Programmable Spaceships' and I thought I'd set up a blog to keep interested people up-to-date with development, and also to get some encouragement and ideas from everyone out there on the interwebs.
In case you haven't guessed, the game is about programming spaceships. You create a fleet of spaceships, each with a program you've written loaded into it, and then seek out (via matchmaking or maybe a database of uploaded fleets) an opponent. Your programmed spaceships then duke it out, and the winner is the first fleet who wins.
The game is coming along nicely - here's a demo of some code being written and some spaceships fighting (mostly code, skip to about 2:30 for combat). I recommend you view the video in HD on Youtube if you're interested in the code - otherwise it'll be eyestrain city for you.



I intend to keep you fine people up to date with development news, videos, and hopefully eventually beta access. I also intend to get a slightly more appropriate and much less generic layout on here in the next few days. So, watch this space and I'll try and keep this thing interesting.