Sunday, February 3, 2013
Summary
Although the hours might try to portray today as another slow-paced-Sunday, don't listen to them, because I swear it wasn't!!! Yesterday, I said I was going to start playing around with power grids. Today, I finished implementing power grids, including the foundational code, UI, and mechanics...
Indeed, it's every bit as fun as I was expecting! One can boost power to thrusters, for example, and the thruster trail gets bigger, redder, and the ship goes faster. It's quite fun. If you turn all other subsystems down to zero power (I.e., route 100% of power to propulsion), you can hit some pretty sweet speeds! Of course, you'll never be able to kill anyone, since your weapons are down...but man, you sure could scare them, rocketing toward them at lightspeed, pretending to be a kamikaze craft
Routing all power to weapons is equally fun. For the case of pulse weapons, they fire faster. In the case of beam weapons, they hurt more. In the case of missiles...well, I'm not sure exactly what will happen yet (open to suggestions, as always). But what's more fun than just routing all power to weapons, is routing all power to ONE weapon, and turning the rest off. So you're left with an uber-chaingun that's firing like 1000 RPM or something like that. While fun, this tactic is not necessarily efficient. I have made it so that overclocking a subsystem does not scale linearly. The scaling mechanism will most likely depend on how efficient your power grid is, but, suffice it to say, doubling power will never mean doubling output - it will always be less, perhaps by a small margin, perhaps by a large one. In that sense, if you have 10 weapons, distributing power evenly among them is always the most efficient mechanism, as opposed to taking 9 offline and routing everything to one. With this scheme, it's still advantageous to buy lots of weapons. Nonetheless, if, for example, you know that a certain weapon is very powerful against shields, and your enemy still has a shield up, then you might gain an advantage by overpowering that weapon, even if it means an overall loss in efficiency.
Anyway, even with this very simple system, it's clear to me that great depth is going to emerge quickly, and I like how it leaves the door open for players to develop their own power management style. Of course, if you never want to touch these in-depth things, you don't have to! Distributing power evenly among systems is a fine policy. In addition, if a subsystem gets destroyed, your computer will automatically redistribute the extra available power. So for players that want to keep it simple, you're welcome to do so! I'm also planning to support binding power settings to hotkeys, so that you can quickly switch between your various saved settings (for example, hit a single key to divert all energy to propulsion and make a quick escape).
On top of implementing that mechanism, I also worked on the first rendering widget, which is intended to display an orthographic view of your ship, along with hardpoint information. It's a nice way to get a graphical view of your subsystems, and the subsystems are represented by icons that tell you the subsytem type, integrity, and how much power they are receiving. Currently, I'm encoding all of that information in concentric rings. I quite like the radial icon look. It seems very slick and futuristic. Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that it's the most effective way to encode information, as I can't really tell yet whether the player will be able to ascertain the information quickly at-a-glance with these radial icons. Oh, and, since the holographic effect shown in the command interface was so popular, it will also be the rendering style used for this hardpoint/ship information view
Hour Tally
Coding: 4.03
Internet: 3.34
Testing: 2.65
Total Logged Time: 10.01
Post
Mon Feb 04, 2013 12:24 am
#1
Week of February 3, 2013
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford