This definitely brought back memories of playing Wing Commander. I had a ton of fun blowing up those space rocks! What else needs to be done with the interface before you could call it finished?
Nice, have to agree I think I preferred the music that was in there before, but other than that this is moving along very nicely, Has a great feel to it, those improved explosions are pretty sweet too.
I am checking this Alpha religiously for changes :P I can't quite figure out if the ship now flies faster or the big cruiser is smaller... But either way, amazing work. The fact there are multiple carriers in there now makes it feel like a proper space game now and the BSG-esque music is just perfect. It's all coming together so well, you should be proud just for getting this far.
Thanks, Armondikov! I added in two PSN Cruisers last night, the Narvik, and the Litani River. Oh, I also added ship identifiers. I still need to do the ones for the St Nazaire, but you can see how they look, and it's fairly cool. I did increase the flying speed, it's about twice as fast as it used to be, and the guns fire bolts that move faster.
I also tweaked the explosions to look better, and the ship textures to be trilinearly filtered, so there's not as much pixel crawl. http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
Enjoy!
Wow, looking great! My big suggestion would be to invert the mouse up/down movement, but looks great! Hopefully you'll be compiling this in a higher res as well? It's a bit fuzzy on my HD monitors at work...maybe I'm just spoiled! Love the launching sequence, great job!
Unfortunately, it has stopped loading for me now (in both Opera and FF). The Grotto Test file still works, so assume it must be a glitch on the Unity3D file. No biggie, I must have personally eaten most of your server's bandwidth over the last week or two and have this other little thing called "work" to deal with.
That looks absolutely stunning, to see that it's running on Unity on top of a web browser speak of how much gaming tech has advanced the last five years.
Your amazing texture work also helps mitigate the lack of polygons a lot, makes everything looks even better that full PC titles, and makes everything look amazing without actually impacting performance. As a game artist, I can tell you that is just priceless.
For all my finished Trek fan art, please visit my portfolio
I hope you don't mind me doing this, but I was flying around in the Alpha and this shot just sort of happened. And with the lens flare and other ships just right I just had to hit print screen. You really have hit the brief of retro-but-modern graphics and, you know what, I think it actually looks better and more real than most overblown modern graphics.
I'll stop gushing now. One current criticism I have is that the IDs on the ships look a different resolution to the background textures. I know this is a bit of an issue whenever you use decal textures like this, but it does draw attention to itself in the current guise.
Just wanted to drop a bug report on the lens flares (which do look awesome, by the way). If you're flying into the sun with it "hidden" by the cockpit and it's near the bottom of the screen, if you use the afterburner (so causing the screen to shake) it glitches and can think that the sun is "visible" when it isn't. You get the effect of the sun's flare appearing inside the cockpit when it shouldn't.
One thing I've especially come to like is the ability to dance across the hull of a capital ship and to turn around their hull, using them for temporary cover.
The ability to automatically do a 180A° roll after double-tapping A or D is quite nice as well.
Missile selection on E already works as well, but I can't seem to be able to fire any of them (probably won't work until the target selection system has been added).
japetus: Inversion of the y axis will be an option, for sure! I won't be making this game in a higher-resolution - the desired/design resolution is 640x400x2, or 1280x800 with pixel doubling. I'm deliberately going for an old school look!
Armondikov: You probably caught me uploading a new version. Not too much I can do about the different texel density between the ID Markings and the ship itself - I'm trying to make it similar, but I'll never be able to make it exact, I'm afraid. And the lensflare glitch should be fixed now - I believe that was due to me updating the flare every frame as fast as possible, and not only when the physics update, so it was looking for the cockpit collider and not finding it. I swapped it around, and I can't see the problem on my end anymore. If you could verify, I'd be grateful.
Rekkert: Thanks, dude! I appreciate that, quite a bit. I hope I can continue to live up to expectations. :P
lennier1: Thanks! I'm a pretty big fan of the barrel rolls, myself. One maneuver I've still got to add is the double-S emergency brake - hit that and you immediately slow down to nothing. That, a barrel roll, and an afterburn will make it pretty interesting evading fire...And trying to kill other players, I suspect. The only parts of the missile system I've made so far are the things that handle the displays and the selection. Actual firing is a ways off, unfortunately.
alonzo11208: Thanks, sir!
So, yesterday I made a Destroyer - A much smaller version of the Cruisers that were in the build previously - they're very similar in role to early WW2 Destroyers - anti-torpedoboat support, AKA bomber screens. They can't support fighters on their own, but are fairly deadly gunplatforms against anything smaller than another cruiser.
Here're some in progress shots:
And here's the finished model in max:
and in the game!
And it's in the build as well. http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
Enjoy!
Thanks for the reply. Glad I'm not the only one who likes details like that.
One more thing I'm looking forward to are more Newtonian flight characteristics.
Think of B5's Starfuries, which used one of the most powerful maneuvers in space fighter combat: In a chase, accelerate to max, flip the fighter in the other direction, cut the engines to maintain your speed and then open fire from all ports.
No problem with the ID resolution. To be fair, it'll probably help with in-game mechanics for it to stand out just a little bit!
Lens flare on the star works fine on this end too. I can't replicate the bug on this build. The fade-out on that flare is much more rapid so you don't get that effect. BUT, the engine flares fade out slowly so they temporarily appear where they shouldn't. Is that just a case of applying the same fix to those flares?
The A/D double-tap for me is doing 360, not 180, though. It's that rapid turn you see the Vipers in BSG doing that I really want to try out! :cool:
Seems like the barrel roll's arc was changed since the last time I tried it.
BTW: For a real treat, slowly fly across the carrier's landing bay as if you wanted to land, come to a standstill near the end, turn around and then hit the afterburner. Simply amazing!
BTW: For a real treat, slowly fly across the carrier's landing bay as if you wanted to land, come to a standstill near the end, turn around and then hit the afterburner. Simply amazing!
I've played around with taking a short patrol and landing. It makes me think that the first "story mode" mission should be a rookie just going out, fly a bit, then come in to land just before BAM! Alien invasion! Now turn around and FIGHT!
Anyway, has the acceleration been changed again? I was getting quite used to a slightly slower throttle.
lennier1: Thanks! That End-over-end flip whilst maintaining forward velocity is a nifty thing - I don't think I'll do it automatically. I think the better option is to add an auto slide option where forward thrust cuts off, and you can turn whatever direction you want. I haven't messed with the throttle or barrel roll scripts, so their values should be identical. And that sudden realization of coming under fire is EXACTLY what's going to happen.
Armondikov: It was just that simple, yes - the Engine flares should be behaving the same way as the sun now. and the barrel roll should do 360 - it currently does closer to 380, but that's just my math being off. I'll fix it. I also would like to Emulate Enemy Starfighter and do some sort of visual effect that shows when you afterburn... like streak marks, or something. IU have not messed with the throttle at all - I will be, though. I'll be tweaking that all week.
Elowan: Thanks!
Nice work as ever fella. Yeah can't wait to bob in for a look around and see energy weapon fire streaking across the screen. I wouldn't put it past you way these assets have been popping up in the Alpha so regularly. Loving the look of this fleet in formation.
Really digging that Enemy Starfighter too, very retro looking and cool, and the functionality and fluid feel of the gameplay looks awesome.
Perhaps it might have just been two different computers/browsers that was making it appear like a slower throttle. I know it does run a lot smoother on my work PC compared to my shockingly-old-nearly-broken-about-to-be-replaced-by-a-quad-core-i7 one.
I don't think you need any afterburner effects. The shake and sudden increase in speed is good enough for it. But if there's one thing I've learned while watching your work over years, it's that when you say something will look cool, it almost certainly will!
Posts
But I don't care. Immensely satisfying with explosions and all that jazz now!
Genuinely amazing work there. :thumb:
:thumb:
I also tweaked the explosions to look better, and the ship textures to be trilinearly filtered, so there's not as much pixel crawl.
http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
Enjoy!
EDIT: Scratch that, it's working again!
That looks absolutely stunning, to see that it's running on Unity on top of a web browser speak of how much gaming tech has advanced the last five years.
Your amazing texture work also helps mitigate the lack of polygons a lot, makes everything looks even better that full PC titles, and makes everything look amazing without actually impacting performance. As a game artist, I can tell you that is just priceless.
I'll stop gushing now. One current criticism I have is that the IDs on the ships look a different resolution to the background textures. I know this is a bit of an issue whenever you use decal textures like this, but it does draw attention to itself in the current guise.
Guys, in case you haven't already done so, don't forget to use Q to cycle through the different weapons modes that are currently available.
The ability to automatically do a 180A° roll after double-tapping A or D is quite nice as well.
Missile selection on E already works as well, but I can't seem to be able to fire any of them (probably won't work until the target selection system has been added).
Armondikov: You probably caught me uploading a new version.
Rekkert: Thanks, dude! I appreciate that, quite a bit. I hope I can continue to live up to expectations. :P
lennier1: Thanks! I'm a pretty big fan of the barrel rolls, myself. One maneuver I've still got to add is the double-S emergency brake - hit that and you immediately slow down to nothing. That, a barrel roll, and an afterburn will make it pretty interesting evading fire...And trying to kill other players, I suspect. The only parts of the missile system I've made so far are the things that handle the displays and the selection. Actual firing is a ways off, unfortunately.
alonzo11208: Thanks, sir!
So, yesterday I made a Destroyer - A much smaller version of the Cruisers that were in the build previously - they're very similar in role to early WW2 Destroyers - anti-torpedoboat support, AKA bomber screens. They can't support fighters on their own, but are fairly deadly gunplatforms against anything smaller than another cruiser.
Here're some in progress shots:
And here's the finished model in max:
and in the game!
And it's in the build as well.
http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
Enjoy!
One more thing I'm looking forward to are more Newtonian flight characteristics.
Think of B5's Starfuries, which used one of the most powerful maneuvers in space fighter combat: In a chase, accelerate to max, flip the fighter in the other direction, cut the engines to maintain your speed and then open fire from all ports.
Lens flare on the star works fine on this end too. I can't replicate the bug on this build. The fade-out on that flare is much more rapid so you don't get that effect. BUT, the engine flares fade out slowly so they temporarily appear where they shouldn't. Is that just a case of applying the same fix to those flares?
The A/D double-tap for me is doing 360, not 180, though. It's that rapid turn you see the Vipers in BSG doing that I really want to try out! :cool:
BTW: For a real treat, slowly fly across the carrier's landing bay as if you wanted to land, come to a standstill near the end, turn around and then hit the afterburner. Simply amazing!
I've played around with taking a short patrol and landing. It makes me think that the first "story mode" mission should be a rookie just going out, fly a bit, then come in to land just before BAM! Alien invasion! Now turn around and FIGHT!
Anyway, has the acceleration been changed again? I was getting quite used to a slightly slower throttle.
Armondikov: It was just that simple, yes - the Engine flares should be behaving the same way as the sun now. and the barrel roll should do 360 - it currently does closer to 380, but that's just my math being off. I'll fix it.
Elowan: Thanks!
Really digging that Enemy Starfighter too, very retro looking and cool, and the functionality and fluid feel of the gameplay looks awesome.
I don't think you need any afterburner effects. The shake and sudden increase in speed is good enough for it. But if there's one thing I've learned while watching your work over years, it's that when you say something will look cool, it almost certainly will!