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.