Day 17: 19 February 2013
20:48: Let me start off the day by saying I spent part of my time updating the navigation on my tutorial website, specifically in the C# tutorials.
I’d love feedback on that, if you have time to check it out. I’d rather fix any problems with it before taking the time to roll it out to all of my other tutorials there.
Now. On to the game development!
23:01: While it has a ton of work to do still, the shipyard is now coming together. Below is a screenshot of the first ship ever built in the shipyard!
Yes, I added like 30 guns to my ship. This gives you an idea of what you might be able to do in the shipyard. You construct the hull, probably from hull pieces/building blocks. Then, you can attach the pieces you want to the outside of the hull, however you want. I’m planning on making it so that you can mirror things (adding to one side adds to the opposite side automatically), and that things that are mounted on the spine (within some tolerance of the center) will snap to the center line automatically. Things like that will make it easier to build nicer looking ships.
And in theory, the ship in the image above is actually a ship you’d be able to create. There’s not necessarily a limit to the number of guns that you place on a ship. Just that the more guns you have, the more it costs to build one, and the slower it is, because of the additional mass of the guns.
And there will be much more than just guns that you can attach to a ship. You’d be able to attach sensors, bays (as in hangar bays or cargo bays) communications arrays, shield generators, engines (don’t forget those), and a variety of other utility objects.
Of course, as I dive into this, I’m beginning to see all of the pieces that I’m going to need to write code for. As I said, there’s still a ton of work left to do, but I’m maintaining at least a little hope that this could actually come together into something worthwhile by time the 100 days is up. Cross your fingers!
1 Comment
Windwalker
20 February 2013 at 02:15 pm
Awesommeeeee!!!
Flood of questions jutsu!
Will I be able to make any kind of shape as the basic hull? Or are we going to choose from some existing hull models?
Oh and how do you save the crafted ship into a functional 3d entity imn the code so that player can spawn it? The turrets and other modifications will have to work on their own, so the ship class will have to be a class of some intricate design. how will it come together? I can’t wait to see your class diagrams! That is if you are ever going to share them. Or at least a description of how the ship class (or classes that make up the ship) work and update. And how will you handle computer AI to make it’s own ships?