Space War: The New Frontier

Recently, I suddenly realized that creating a game similar to Spacewar, or rather Star Control, would be pretty simple in GameMaker Studio.

Unfortunately (wink), I discovered that it now has a built-in 2-D rigid-body physics engine.  Cue lots of experimentation:

 Fig 1: Plasma beam fired while spaceship is rotating.

Fig 2: Ship rotating because of recoil from firing mass driver.

 Fig 3: Experimenting with graphics effects.

Physics Trouble

As you might have noticed, I made some changes to the first post of my physics sequence, and although I had posted a second post, I removed it after a few days.

The reason is that I have been re-evaluating some of the decisions that I made, and doing lots of mathematics.  Pages and pages full of equations.  It's ridiculous, it's not even funny. ;^)

I have managed to write the potential-field function in matrix form, and this has shown me several further possibilities on how the physics engine can be used, and also some ways to optimize it and to adapt it to run on the GPU.  And, furthermore, it could run as a part of the graphics rendering pipeline without slowing it down.

So, my physics sequence is on hold until I have managed to organize my thoughts and tested them mathematically.  If you're getting bored, go play Path of Exile. :^J

Debuggy Spaceships

I have made much progress with Dreadnaught, my Star Control 2-inspired space adventure game.

The game now loads spaceship designs and images from files and can construct such spaceships in the combat space. The files are entirely human-readable, so people will be able to mod in their own spaceships.

If you zoom in on the picture above, you will notice that each spaceship has a blue triangle, and some red dots near the edges. These are debugging tools. The blue triangle shows where the computer thinks the spaceship is, and the red dots show the collision hull. This allows me to line them up properly. I made the spaceship entirely white for clarity; the actual game will have beautifully drawn pixel-art spaceships, asteroids, beams, particles and so forth.

The collision hull, mass, rotational inertia, center of mass and all other physical properties are calculated from the spaceship image to make sure that they match. This has the consequence that, if you make a spaceship with only one opaque pixel in its texture, that it will be very light and quick, but also very fragile and having very small energy reserves. There is also no hard limit on how big a ship may be; it just depends on what your computer can handle.

Dancing Triangles

A screenshot from Dreadnaught (codename). The triangles now respond to the keyboard and half of the physics is in. The triangles fly around nicely, but they cannot collide yet.

Of course, eventually they won't be triangles, but rather textured quads with lighting. And there will be particles and special effects. And a story. And moddability! Stuff will explode!!!

Secret Progress

The secret project, codename Dreadnaught, is proceeding rapidly.

The menu is working; including the switch to the combat test.
The combat screen is rendering, but without textures or lighting.

I am now working on movement, acceleration, rotation and collisions.

I will post screenshots and an explanation of the game when I have more to show.