Development Updates (v0.6 - 0.6.6.3)

[Christian Knudsen]

Quest additions and changes:

- Be able to specify weight of a quest item
- Placement of quest characters on ships
- CharacterSpawn function to set how many random characters to spawn on board a quest ship when boarded (0 if no random characters)
- Event : Docked (: ship name)
- Event : Boarded (: ship name)
- Event : FactionAttitude : faction name
- Event : DistanceTo : nav point
- Result : PlaceItem (instead of PlaceItemOnBase and GiveItem)
- ChangeCharacterOrder : BoardPlayerShip
- ChangeCharacterOrder : LeavePlayerShip
- ChangeCharacterOrder : BoardDockedShip
- Result (or OnLoad) : ShowImage : image name (for creating "cutscenes" and intros/endings)
- Integrated ASCII drawing program for making images


Miscellaneous stuff:

- A* pathfinding
- Backpack for carrying more stuff
- Be able to ask friendly ships to not attack your target (if you for example need it alive for a bounty mission)
- 'L'ook should list things on the ground as well as names (ship types) of landed ships
- Be able to sell stuff from your locker at the equipment shop
- Items have weight and you can only carry so much before being burdened
- Proper closet on your ship to organize all your stuff in
- For ships with multiple launchers, pressing Return will only fire one missile/torpedo at a time
- Locking bar to show how close your missile is to being locked on target
- Stop/Don't stop at new friendly contacts autopilot option
- NPCs should be affiliated with a faction so that, for example, killing a merchant on board his ship will decrease your standing with that faction
- Merge used ammo clips
- Five new systems
- Seven new bases
- Casino ship
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've started work on the coding stuff for v0.6 instead of just doing ship layouts. This means that I likely won't release any new versions until v0.6 (unless there are some major bugs that turn up).
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've now got the basic ship docking procedure done. In the below movie you can see me disabling and boarding a Demon (it's actually my wingman - he should have thought twice before taking the gig!). I haven't yet added code for loading characters, objects and cargo on the boarded ship, so it's pretty empty.

http://www.asciisector.net/development/09-07-27/board1.zip (0.1 MB)

(Unzip and place in the 'movies' folder of your game directory.)
 

[Christian Knudsen]

You can now transfer cargo from one ship to another. I've had to change the cargo manifest screen slightly to make room for the "Transfer" buttons. This is what was on a Galaxy that I boarded:


 

[Christian Knudsen]

All coding is now done for v0.6. I just have to finish the layouts for the remaining ships and do some testing.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I'm going to spend most of today doing layouts for the remaining ships. Hopefully I'll get all of them done, but if not, I'll finish them tomorrow. Then it'll just be a matter of some final testing and v0.6 should be good to go.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Phew, I'm done for today. I managed to get 4½ ship layouts done, so tomorrow I'll finish the Paradigm layout and do some testing. Looking forward to boarding some ships!
 

[Christian Knudsen]

The current pathfinding algorithm I'm using is pretty slow. I'm using a floodfill algorithm, which basically fills adjacent tiles from the start tile until it hits the goal tile. I've been doing some tests with A* and using a binary heap to manage the "open tile list" used for A*. It's working fine now, so I did some speed tests. Doing a single pathfinding wasn't measurable. It took less than 1 ms. I had to do 100 pathfinding loops to measure it. 100 loops only took 7 ms. For reference, the screen is updated approximately once every 25 ms. My tests were only on a 20x20 tiles map with randomly placed obstacles, but it still means that I should be able to do a LOT of pathfinding calls without any performance hits.

I probably won't add the A* pathfinding for the next release (there are still some implementation issues that I need to work out), but it will definitely be added in the near future.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I'm currently doing some rewriting and optimization of some code. In a nutshell, I'm having each tile keep information about whether or not you can walk through it, see through it, if it's a blind spot, and if there's a character on it. Until now I've checked each tile for this information whenever needed, instead of having the tile 'remember' it. For example, instead of cycling through all the active characters to check if there's one on a given tile, I now just keep track of characters from the tile itself (i.e. if a character moves from one tile to another, first set that tiles CharacterHere attribute to zero and then set the moved to tile's attribute to the character's number). This really makes things a lot easier and probably a bit faster (certainly for pathfinding). This will also fix bugs that seem to crop up from time to time (thrown grenades being stopped by smoke, able to target characters in smoke/blind spot, and so on).
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've got most parts of capturing and killing a bounty target on board his ship done. In order to capture a target, you'll first have to stun him, then capture him with your ElectroCuffs (just click on "Capture" when viewing his inventory) and then transfer him over to your ship (click on "Transfer"). I've also made it so that if you instead destroy his ship and scoop him up (there'll be a smaller chance of him ejecting in the next version, so you'll have to board his ship to be 100% sure to get him), he'll not automatically be captured, but will roam around your ship and attack you or run away. You'll then have to stun and capture him in the same manner. I'm thinking about adding this for all hostile ejectees you scoop up, so that they'll not automatically be transformed into 1 unit of Slaves.

Oh, and I've also got A* pathfinding implemented, so the pathfinding routines are a lot faster now and use much less CPU.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've now made it so that any equipment a character is carrying will be stored on him when/if he ejects from his ship. So if you board a ship, fight a bit with a dude, run off to your own ship, destroy his ship and pick him up as en ejected pilot, he will still have all the same equipment on him. Which is of course how it should be, but it took quite a bit of programming.

Characters will now also try to knock your gun/rifle out of your hand if you're standing right next to them when shooting (and you will likewise automatically try to knock them out of their hands when they shoot). I had a fun fight with a dude where we kept fighting for my gun. I would shoot at him and he would knock it out of my hands and pick it up, get a few shots off before I knocked it out of his hands, and so on. In the end a cop killed me. But it really feels more like melee combat when you're standing next to each other and can't just fire your gun at point blank range without a risk of losing it.

I've also sped the TIME USED countdown up a bit as well as the combat messages.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've begun playing around with the casino ship, so today I made video poker:



I plan to also have Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, Slots and Keno.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I found out yesterday that a new version of SDL_mixer has been released (I'm actually a couple of versions behind with the one distributed with the Windows and Mac versions of the game). This version seem to fix an issue I had with setting a piece of music to loop indefinitely (it would crackle after playing through the first time). However, I now have an issue with being unable to switch music tracks. I hope to figure out what's going on with that, since this new version may (or may not) fix the music crash bug. That's my hope, at least...
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've just had confirmation that the issue I was having with SDL_mixer 1.2.10 is in fact a bug within SDL_mixer. A 1.2.11 version of SDL_mixer is to be released that fixes this, so I'll include this with the next release. Fingers crossed that this fixes the music crashes that've been plaguing the game ever since I added music!
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Blackjack is finally done:



This was a lot more complicated than I had anticipated, since you're able to split hands and stuff. But I finally got it working now. I'll probably start working on the roulette next.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Work on the Roulette is progressing fine. But I've also been playing around with OpenGL more and have managed to get Framebuffer Objects working, which should make dirty rectangles possible. This means that Ascii Sector running under OpenGL shouldn't be that difficult. I'll try to implement it when the casino is done. You'll need videocard drivers that supports at least OpenGL 1.5, I believe, but I'll probably just make it so that if your videocard doesn't support Framebuffer Objects, it'll just fall back to normal SDL instead of OpenGL.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

The roulette is done:



I don't think I'll be doing craps, so that leaves slots and keno. I'll probably do slots next.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Slots done:



Keno is next. Should be relatively easy compared to the other games.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

The casino ship is done. I've made some changes to the NPC pathfinding to allow for them to switch positions with other NPCs (since the player will now be able to do this in Combat Mode, the NPCs should as well) and need to run some tests on these changes.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

With the casino ship fully implemented and the most immediate bugs fixed, I'll now start working on the last planned major 0.6 release, 0.6.4. The aim of this release basically is to implement the last remaining items on the list at the start of this thread: on board ship stuff for quest writing, backpack, a proper closet on your ship to organize your stuff, and 5 new systems being the most important stuff.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Development has been a bit slow lately. This is because I've been working on my master thesis at the university and haven't really had much spare time to work on Ascii Sector, unfortunately. This will probably continue to be the case for the next month or so until I finish my thesis, after which I'll be able to steam ahead with all the things planned for v0.6.4. So, just know that the lack of development in the coming month isn't a sign of lack of interest, just real life interfering.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

My thesis has been printed and bound, and is just waiting to be handed in on April 6th. My girlfriend has banished me from our apartment tonight, as she's having friends over for a girls' night. So I'm currently sitting at the university library with my trusty Eee PC doing the first bit of programming on Ascii Sector in a long time. Feels good! I'm currently giving all items weight, which will be used to limit the amount of items you can carry in your backpack.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

The backpack is now up and running. I've made a short movie to demonstrate how it works.

www.asciisector.net/development/10-04-11/backpack.zip (0.05 MB)

Making the locker on your ship for storing all your stuff shouldn't be very hard as I can reuse almost all of the backpack code.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

And the locker is now done as well. There's just a computer terminal in your closet that you can use to access your locker. I'm going to program the effect of being burdened by too much weight next.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I'm now done with the whole backpack/locker thing. You now walk slower when carrying more than 20 kilos. And you can't move at all if carrying more than 100. Your locker is placed in your closet, so if there's any stuff laying on the ground where the locker is placed when you first load your game in v0.6.4, those items will be moved to a free tile. They won't however be moved immediately when you load if your inside your ship. You'll have to exit your ship and re-enter for the items to be moved from the tile now occupied by your locker.

I've also implemented character factions, so characters now belong to a faction. They can belong to the 7 existing factions when spawning on board a ship, or Police or Civilian when spawning on a planet. If you kill a character belonging to the 7 existing factions, that'll decrease your standing with that faction just like if you destroyed their ship. So no more killing merchants on board their ships without decreasing your standing with merchants!

EDIT: Also, when you leave a boarded ship, if the only character that's left alive to pilot the ship belongs to a different faction than the ship, the ship's faction will now change. This'll come in handy when you get to build up your own fleet, as you'll be able to board a ship, kill everybody on board, and then transfer over a character belonging to your faction to pilot the ship and get another ship in your fleet.