aRkker's Spacebuild Game Development blog

A blog about me, and the development of my project, Spacebuild. Mostly about the project.

[arkker-blog]

Status update

The recent doings within the project have been on the design level really. Thinktanking and all that. Now as we've gotten the generation of the planets sorted out and working quickly, we started to design how we want our solar systems and galaxies built.

Once we'll get the planet generation in order and the galaxy / solar system simulation working, we'll start working towards creating the big vessels that allow you to traverse from solar system to another.

Martin also brought us some sound assets to the game. Surprising how much they can change the overall feel of the game. I would screenshot them, but that wouldn't bring much joy to you.

[arkker-blog]

The do's and done's

I thought it would be a good idea to share a bit of what has been done and what has been confirmed as "definitely getting into the game" from the massive jar of cool ideas we've got. There is a lot of very good ideas in the jar, but some of them may not be getting into the game due to technical limitations or because they'd require a (yet another) massive overhaul of some existing components.

World and Terrain

Currently, I believe we're done with the terrain ENGINE-component. This means that we will stick with the current way things are made, which is that you have a flat planet like in this lovely screenshot (btw new trees!):

http://i.imm.io/1e99h.png

The planet is infinite, in a sense. It loops back around. Think of the planet's surface like a tank track, rotating around. This creates an illusion of a round planet... sort of. Once you leave the planet's surface up into space, the planet will be transformed into a circle. The surface will bend and connect to the other end, causing you to realistically land on different spots depending on your angle of arrival when landing. 

Now the reason I say that only the ENGINE part is done, is because we've not actually done all that much of work on the actual surface of the terrain. Everything is just done via a pseudo-random number generator, and the result is... poor. Also there are no bodies of water. So the terrain requires a bit of work. We're not going to work out multiple biomes (probably) per planet, but rather have each planet be of a specific biome. What this means is that one planet may be a lush jungle planet with a lot of vegetation and relatively high air temperature and moisture, while an another planet can be a snowy wasteland, with nothing but mountains of snow and ice. Or then a planet can have no atmosphere at all requiring you to bring your own lifesupport with you, should you wish to colonize it. 

Space Travel

Traversing and randomly generating planets is currently done. In my tests, I've generated over 500 planets with each containing over a 100.000 blocks, without even having to worry about the performance. You can up and leave the planets without a loading screen or anything as such. But remember to bring your lifesupport with you when you do, which brings us to an another big thing that is a definite part of the game; Lifesupport. I recall explaining it a bit in the past, but here goes anyway. 

Lifesupport

The way we're going to implement lifesupport is that you need several things in order to successfully traverse space. This is not set in stone, but the original idea was to have the spaceship / space shuttle provide you with oxygen, heat and energy. Energy will be consumed to upkeep the devices that regulate your oxygen and heat in the vessel. Those things are the absolute necessity, a lifeline. Additionally, if you are travelling for a longer period of time, say cross-star system or even cross-galaxy, you'll need defense against radiation. The longer you spend in space, the more of radiation poisoning you'll accumulate, eventually leading into death. That's the idea anyway, but again, this is not set in stone and as with everything, this is subject to change. 

Gathering energy is going to be simple. Either burn coal (which will slowly deteriorate the atmosphere, making the planet colder and deader until it is a barren moon-like wasteland), use the wind (if the planet has an atmosphere) or gather solar energy (works always). This produces energy, which can be stored in batteries of various size. 

Oxygen generation is possible as well. This means that big ships can be self-sustaining. Fit your ship with a greenroom, provide some solar energy for it and you'll have a solution that creates you oxygen and a little bit of heat. Use the solar energy to fill up some batteries, and feed a bit of the power to a radiator, and you have heat. Feed the oxygen, heat and energy to a climate regulator inside your ship (or a planet) and you'll have an artificial atmosphere for your ship (or planet). 

All the resources will have different size containers. The bigger the container, the heavier it is. The heavier it is, the more power it requires to lift off of a planet. The more power required, the more fuel is burned, and the more rockets/propellers/what have you are required. 

Dynamic Weather

The previously mentioned decay of an atmosphere leads to a new point, dynamic weather. Now this is a thing that I've started experimenting with, and may not make it into the game at all, but I'm hoping it will. 

The weather would work semi-realistically. Meaning that there can be only rain if there is an atmosphere and large bodies of liquid water on the surface of the planet. The weather would dominate the temperature and the moisture of the planet.

The weather itself would have rather little effect on the player's daily life. Its a neat side thing. Things like re-growing trees and plants would work faster, meaning that when there's rain, the cut trees would grow back faster. There was one largish thing to affect the player's life, which would be lightning-rod-based-battery-filling-apparatus. This would be a battery, fitted with long metal rods, that would attract lightning strikes during a thunderstorm. When a rod is stricken, it would charge up the battery/device attached to it. 

Crafting

Currently there is a total of 15 items that you can craft. The way our crafting system works has been explained in the past, but I'll freshen your memories and tell the possible new people how it works. 

Heres our inventory:

http://i.imgur.com/dY0Cibe.jpg

On the bottom, you can see the crafting module. On the left side of it, you place the materials, and on the right side, you see what you can craft out of them. You can't however just stuff everything you have into the left box and browse through everything you can craft. You'll need to have the specific materials for each item. This means that if your item requires only wood, you need to have only wood in the left side grid. If you add stone with the wood, the item that required only wood will disappear, leaving you with whatever you can craft from wood + stone, with the quantities of items you've got. 

This adds a bit of adventure and trial & error to the crafting system. You'll have to discover the crafted items your self, but it isn't as strict as Minecraft for example, where you have to have them in specific spots in the grid in order to make it work.

Conclusion

A lot has been done, and a lot is still going to be done. A lot will change between this post and when the game is finished, but I hope that this post gives even a little insight to what is to be expected when you finally get your hands on the title.

[arkker-blog]

Recent doings

Long time no post.

That doesn't mean that stuff hasn't happened. 

We've worked hard on making the space infinite. Meaning that you can explore endless amounts of planets generated with procedural generation. 

It proved to be more of a challenge than anticipated at first. But we've (nearly) beaten it.

We can now generate planets, no matter how big or small, in a time frame that is small enough not to cause any hitch in the gameplay. Not on our test machines anyway. There is however some issues with leaving and arriving on planets, stuff not being placed correctly and whatnot. 

Soon enough when all of that is fixed, you'll get a new video. I promise.

[arkker-blog]

Splish splash

This is the last thing we managed to get working before the huge revamp. The huge revamp was in fact because of this thing was implemented. And this thing is liquids.

ata thought that it would be too much of a hassle (which I totally agreed with) to make the liquid system work with the 4 direction gravity, that we had implemented with the round and circular planets. 

Anyhow, here is a picture of me sitting in my pool on this very warm (+32.4° C here...) cooling myself off! (Don't worry, its not actually me, just my character in game)

http://i.imgur.com/tJmM2mp.jpg

[arkker-blog]

Green and Crystal

The implementation of the old things to the new engine has been going well. I re-wrote the whole tree and crystal objects entirely from scratch, making them much more efficient and easier to use.

http://i.imgur.com/ti40vP5.jpg

Here's something green and something crystal. 

Next thing we're going to do something new. It has to do with the background, and it hasn't yet been locked down how its going to look. I hope the game is going to look much prettier once we're done!

[arkker-blog]

Recent progression

Recently we've been focusing entirely on bringing the old functionality over to the new terrain engine. 

The whole terrain engine change was a much larger change than I initially anticipated. It makes sense really, in a game like this where the whole terrain plays a very large role, it also is a huge part of the engine.

http://i.imm.io/19BC5.png

There's a picture with all the old stations imported to the new one, as well as an open door. Next stop would be the trees. We need the trees back, the world is very bare without them. That'll take some time due to the nature of the way the trees are built, as well as the crystal deposits, but it'll be done soon. 

This whole engine revamp process has given me a lot of possibilities to fix old issues and improve upon old systems, which is why the progression might seem slow. A lot of performance updates have been done, as well as just general usability of the code has been improved a lot. I could spend all eternity improving upon what I've created in the past, but that'd get me nowhere. So a line has to be drawn, and focus has to be shifted into advancing the actual game.

[arkker-blog]

Shading progression

This week has gone almost completely into bug fixing on the implementation of the new terrain + developing the lighting engine. The block-based lighting engine has gone through a lot of different algorithms and iterations, but I think I've found the one that sits the best. 

Without further a due:

http://i.imgur.com/IFuLDRO.jpg

The hole I dug myself there is much deeper than just the end of the lit area. The picture there demonstrates different levels of shadow and also the ambient light's venture down the hole, eventually "drying out".

[arkker-blog]

Implementation to the real world

Today, I've tried implementing the new terrain engine from our testbed project to the real thing. It was a relatively painless, but quite a long haul. The engine itself is like 90-95% done, some tweaking needs to be done but the functionality is there. 

I'm going to show a picture that's VERY much work in progress. The shadows aren't being blurred at all, and the background isn't supposed to be visible. 

http://i.imgur.com/dsunBEy.png

To compare to the old planet system, with the square planets, it took me around 30 seconds to dig through the planet to the other side, maybe 30 - 40 blocks. I did the same test with this new system, and it took me just above 2 minutes, and I gathered 328 blocks. There's a bit of a size comparison.

[arkker-blog]

Hills, mountains, lakes and stuff.

There has been some significant progress on the terrain department in the last week. ata has been working his ass off on the new terrain system I briefly described in the last post. It is now almost complete, some optimizations are still needed and an additional feature that allows me to work out the shading for the terrain. 

Right before this terrain revamp, we were working on implementing liquids to the engine. This is what actually lead us to revamp the terrain. It was just too difficult and stupid to deal with liquids gravity when there was essentially 4 different directions for the gravity, because a square has 4 sides. 

To get a better grasp of how the terrain works right now, think of a tank. A tank has 2 tracks that keep rotating around it in order to bring the tank forward/backward/what have you. Our terrain works a little bit like a tank-track. As the player moves, the terrain keeps rotating new blocks in front of the player, and recycling the ones on the back. But there are 2 terrains going on all the time. One is the one where the player walks on and does stuff, and the other one is flipped 180 degrees, and underneath the terrain, which is underneath the player.

This is a bit difficult to grasp perhaps, but like I said in the last post; if you don't care about that side of things, all you need to know is that you can run infinitely on either side, without ever finding the "end of the world". Instead, you will eventually come back to where you started the marathon. And on top of that, you can drill through the world to the other side, just as if the world was round. 

[arkker-blog]

Make way!

This weekend we started working on overhauling something old. Again.

More specifically, we started working on the 3rd iteration of the terrain generation. The first one was the round planets. That didn't go well, so we went into square planets. That worked just fine, on a lot of levels, but not enough. 

Now, we're working on the 3rd iteration. Technically, to the player, it is going to seem like an endless, flat planet. By endless, I mean that once you have run long enough to one direction, you'll eventually come back to where you started from. All seamlessly of course. 

You can also drill through the planet and appear on the other side, just as you would with the square or circular planets. 

I'm not gonna go into deep technical detail of how it all works, but if we can pull this off (looking good, its perhaps 75% done), it is going to be AWESOME.

[arkker-blog]

The night is dark (but not quite full of terrors. Not yet anyway.)

There isn't much to show this time, because the time spent working hasn't been spent on working on the game. I've used the last week and a half to create a launcher for the game. Its a very ugly and simple launcher that downloads the recent most version off of our server and keeps it updated every time you launch it. 

But I did get some working hours into the game itself too. Mainly this:

http://i.imm.io/14XVt.png

Darkness roams in now as the night falls. Previously you would only lose the background blueness, but now, its actually dark. There may be something more to come for the darkness, but that's still on the design board.

[arkker-blog]

Underneath the surface

It's been a while... again. That however does not mean that work hasn'ttä been done. Quite the opposite in fact. It came to my attention that low to mid range computers were struggling with performance. Once you went underground, even my megacomputer would struggle and as a result the FPS would fall to 30, sometimes even below that. So the workload since the last post has more or less been fighting this issue. And it is also now fixed. Even very low range computers (read: Erki's computer) ran the game at a soaring 60 fps (the upper cap). This means I can now move on to testing something that can only be properly demonstrated by a video. What that is? Time will tell.

[arkker-blog]

New stuff!

It's been a while again. Well, not that long but still.

I have some new stuff to show the all of you. Couple of new things. 

Firstly, I've worked out a very simple tooltip system for the inventory to make it a bit clearer that what the stuff in your inventory is. Here's an example:

http://i.imm.io/12R8w.jpeg

You may have noticed two new things from that picture. First of all, the mouse cursor has changed to our custom one (a gray circle with a pointy edge kind of a thing...) and the new portion next to the inventory. 

That's right, I've been working on equippable items and armor. Currently there's only 1 item that can be equipped, the Gravity Boots.

http://i.imm.io/12R8O.jpeg

http://i.imm.io/12R8T.jpeg

These boots come with some magic powers, as the tooltip ever so subtly implies. By pressing X or C, one can shift their gravity. What this means is that normally you would be falling towards the closest planet, but what these boots do is they change the direction of your gravity. Each time you press C or X, you shift it by 90 degrees. That means, you can do this:

http://i.imm.io/12R9w.jpeg

You can, and will, drift to space with these. But that is strongly advised against, as you will die a horrible death doing so without any other equipment.

[arkker-blog]

Some green 'n' crystal

The last week I've been working on completing the migration from the round planets to the square ones. I've finished it apart from a few minor bugs that seem to appear at random. You can once again build the buildings to the world, trees and crystal deposits have appeared again.

http://i.imm.io/12dyH.jpeg

The next big thing that's going to change is the shape of the planet. Again. We're going back to a round setting! But not in the same way as it was before, which was a "smooth round" but more like the following picture will illustrate:

http://i.imm.io/12dva.png

Erki felt that the planet was a bit too round and could be prettier with a "round-yet-blocky" approach. I'll post a new post once that is fixed and ready to be demonstrated.

[arkker-blog]

Alone in the dark

I re-hashed the whole idea of the lighting engine and ended up with a very simplistic (but rather complicated under the hood) looking lighting engine. Its technically just a fog of war for the planet and lights to light that fog of war up. 

A picture is worth more than thousand words:

http://i.imm.io/10HpV.jpeg

Perhaps now it is time to move on to new challenges. 

[arkker-blog]

Short post this time (I promise).

Some progress. I have finished polishing the building system and its now completely operational. I have also fine-tuned the lighting system and I have pics to prove it! 

http://i.imm.io/Zuiv.png

Thats all. I wanted to share that picture, and now I did.

[arkker-blog]

Progress

I haven't had the time to write a post in a while, sorry about that.

I've been working on converting everything from the spherical planets to the new square-like, block-based planets. The task was much more to take on than I originally thought. It is how ever coming together, slowly and steadily.

One of the big causes to the slow migration, if you can call it that, is the fact that I wrote a lighting engine prototype to go along with the change. That took a week on its own. The lighting engine is a prototype, and is subject to change, however it is working quite nice so far. I've only tested with 3 light sources, one of them being the massive light that radiates from the star and two other smaller ones. A picture is worth more than a thousand words, so have a look at these:

http://i.imm.io/YtIV.png

http://i.imm.io/YtJe.png

These ones are the very first pictures ever taken of the engine. In these, the player is the only source of light apart from the ambient lighting. I dug myself inside a ditch to demonstrate the shadows.

http://i.imm.io/Yv4k.png

This one is without any other light sources but the star.

http://i.imm.io/Z8nT.png

This one is the latest picture. It isn't demonstrating the lighting any more as much as it is demonstrating the new building system, which is very much in progress. However, in that picture you can see the player as a light source as well as the star.

None of these pictures represent the final product. As said before, it is a prototype.

That is all I got to showcase this time. We're working as much as we can on the project, both on the code level as well as the design level. We've got a metagame idea that we're quite not ready to discuss yet. But soon.