Development Updates (v0.5.1 - 0.5.4)

[Christian Knudsen]

v0.6 will feature disabling and boarding of other ships in space. Before I start working on that, however, I'll be adding some more stuff to the 0.5.x version line (as well as fixing the various bugs that are sure to crop up!).

The below list shows the stuff I'd like to add for the 0.5.x versions. I'll add more stuff as I think of it. Red is stuff I haven't started on yet; yellow is stuff in progress; green is done.

- Turrets as part of your ship's layout + walking to your turrets to use them.
- Turret AI for purchase in the shipyard.
- Turret Energy Capacitor for purchase in the shipyard.
- Confeds and militia should detect corpses on your ship during scans and act accordingly.
- When in combat mode, you'll see how much time it does to take each action + how much time you've used.
- News item for when commodities end (currently not all events have such a news item).
- Ships sending an apologetic message when they hit a friendly ship by accident (either with gun or missile).
- Wingmen are hired for a period of time, not until you land.
- If there's blood on board your ship after an, uhm, "accident", your repair droid should clean it up with time.
- Quicksave.
- Repair nanobots for repairing hull, guns and launchers.
- Mouse wheel support.
- Updated manual with information about walking around on your ship + updated ship stats.
- When attacking a civilian on a base, he/she will scream for help.
- Ultimate and brilliance drugs for use in combat.
- Display resolution settings in the options menu.
- Improved ship control and aiming precision by adding four more angles.
- NPCs walking around not quite as random.
- Five new systems.
- Four new bases.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I'm playing around with the time system in combat mode and the use of the brilliance and ultimate drugs to fiddle with the time. Here's a movie to show how your time usage is now displayed when in combat mode, and how you can use these drugs to boost your character (essentially buy you more time to do your actions):



As you can see, snorting ultimate will give you an amount of "bonus" time before everybody else can get to react. Using it reduces your health, however, and I actually die in the end by snorting ultimate when my health is too low! While ultimate will give you an amount of "bonus" time, brilliance will speed your character up, so your actions will take a smaller amount of time for a while. Using it will also decrease your health, just like when using ultimate. These drugs will be pretty rare and rather expensive. For the time being, you will only be able to find them on characters that you kill/stun, if you're lucky. When I've changed the system for equipment shops so they don't have infinite amounts of equipment, you'll also be able to buy these drugs on pirate bases.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've changed the way that part of displaying ground maps works, so you can now move the cursor all around the map when looking at characters or aiming a weapon:

http://www.asciisector.net/development/09-05-11/screen.zip (0.16 MB)

I'll add the apologetic messages that ships will sometimes send when hitting a friendly ship and also do a bit of testing, and then v0.5.2 should be ready for release.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Instead of having the NPCs walk around in odd random "dances", I've given the NPCs a random chance of finding a random spot on the base and finding a path to it. This will make NPCs seem a bit less erratic in their movement, as they're actually walking to somewhere.

Here's a movie demonstrating how the NPCs select a random spot and then find a path to it (and how this path is sometimes updated when another character blocks the path). The visualized paths naturally won't be visible in the finished release:

http://www.asciisector.net/development/09-06-07/pathing.zip (0.03 MB)
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Wingmen are now hired for a period of time, instead of until you land. They tell you for how long you can hire them and when that time expires, you can rehire them for the same price (but only once).

I need to fix a minor bug with the "NPCs yelling for help" bit before I start doing the Repair Nanobots. Sometimes when another NPC reacts to the call for help, he immediately starts calling for help himself, instead of assisting the NPC. This can result in a rather funny chain, in which each new NPC just calls other NPCs for help, and in the end everybody on the base is involved (or at least calling for help!).

As to the Repair Nanobots. They'll work in the way that you can buy as many of them as you want (at least as many as you can have on your ship, as they will take up space in the cargo hold), and they will then gradually be used up when repairing guns or armor. I think I'll also make them pretty expensive, since I still want players to have to land to repair their ships once in awhile.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I've got the layout of the five new systems done. I'll post a sneak peak of the new sector map tomorrow. There are only four bases to do, so that shouldn't take too long.

I've also spent a bit of time playing around with SDL and graphics (no, Ascii Sector is not going graphical! ) and this made me experiment with OpenGL under SDL. I think I've got a pretty good grasp of it and it draws to the screen a lot faster than SDL blitting, so if I figure out a few remaining items, the next release may be using OpenGL for screen drawing and consequently using less CPU.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Here's the sneak peak at the five new systems:



Adavene is where the casino ship will be added in one of the 0.6.x releases. I'm calling it "El Dorado" for now.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I just need to make the last base and do some testing, and v0.5.4 should be good to go. I hope to release it some time tomorrow.