VectorStorm Blog

Just a quick post today.  I’ve finally settled on a UI design for MMORPG Tycoon 2 which I think will do everything that I want.  I’ve started on implementing it, but it’s not far enough along to bear having a screengrab taken, yet.

I’m going to be using a vaguely MMORPG-ish UI;  two floating panels at the top of the screen;  one at the top left giving the vital stats of your MMORPG (name, cash, subscribers, etc), and a second one will appear just to its right when you have anything selected.  The second panel will display the name of the thing you have selected, a few vital statistics about that thing (for example, if you’ve selected a character, it would show their class and health. Buildings would show their type and how many visitors they’ve had today, etc), and will also provide a clickable button to bring up detailed information and customisable settings about that object.

In addition, there will be a button bar along the bottom center of the screen, which will provide your basic building, design-setting, and report-checking functionality.

In terms of new code today, you may have noticed from my twitter feed, but I spent an awful lot of time implementing a new type of UI panel today, which when appearing would transition onto the screen in a rather complicated and interesting way.. which turned out to be extremely ugly, once it was implemented and debugged.  So I’m a bit disappointed about that wasted development time.  Maybe I’ll find a different use for that code later, so it won’t turn out to be a total loss.  On a more positive note, I fixed the behaviour of the cursor moving over water today.  In videos you may have seen how the arrow seemed to stretch strangely, when focused on water;  that’s because the tip of the arrow was pointing at the sea floor (though drawing in front of the water), and the rest of the arrow was being pushed up above the level of the water, which gave it a very strange, downward-stretched tip when moving over water.

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to finish up the basic top GUI panes that I mentioned above, and finish a basic “expanded info pane” for at least a couple of types of objects.

Well, I didn’t end up getting player-controlled GraveShip flight in today after all (been trying to work out a nice interface for switching between “walking around on top of the GraveShip” and “Flying the GraveShip”, which kind of links in to the overall UI that’ll be visible in the game.  The one which has been in all the screenshots so far is still the old one from MMORPG Tycoon 1.1.

But while I’m working on designing that UI behaviour, I got something else implemented and working today:  the first bit of the procedural geometry generation code, which will eventually be used to generate the models for buildings, roads, and most other placeable objects in the world.  Here, this first pass of the code has generated an interesting shape for the GraveShip.  It’s difficult to tell in a still screenshot without a shadow (guess I’ll have to implement shadows eventually), but the GraveShip seen here is hovering about a meter above the ground;  you have to jump to get up onto it.  Once I’ve taken this procedural geometry generation a little bit further and am making real buildings using it, I’ll be plonking a small graveyard on top of this floating platform.  But that’s probably still a little ways off.

Blast ships.  Grab any surviving bits from their wreckage.  Bolt the salvaged goods onto your ship to make yourself stronger (and repair any damage).  Goto 10.

While flying about, you may spot a ship with a powerful laser cannon that you want.  If it’s a peaceful ship, you need to decide whether it’s worth attracting the attention of the sector’s law enforcement by destroying that ship to get its cannon.  But even if it’s a pirate vessel that’s already initiated hostilities against you, you’ll still need to figure out how to destroy the ship without destroying the cannon in the process.  And as you’re bolting your new laser cannon to your ship, you’ll have to carefully maintain your ship’s balance in order to keep it handling well.  But don’t take too long rebuilding;  the police and that pilot’s friends are sure to be looking for revenge!

Captain Forever, created by the inimitable Farbs,  is a surprisingly deep and addictive little browser-based shooter which has recently been pre-launched.  By pre-launched, I mean that one can pay cash to support the game and get access to the current version and all future versions, but there is currently no free version available to the public.  The idea is that when Farbs releases a major new version of the game, then the old version becomes freely available to all, and only those who have paid are given access to the new version.  Oh, and at that point, the price goes up, slightly.  This process repeats each time there’s a major new version;  the old version becomes free, and those who have paid gain access to the new version.

Speaking as somebody who’s working on a game and would like for it to be playable by everyone, but also has to figure out ways to financially support the development, I find this approach really interesting, and I’ll be watching Captain Forever’s progress closely.  Of course, I’ve already become a Captain Forever supporter, but I’d played the game during its early closed beta, so I knew that I like the game and that it runs well on my computer, so it was sort of a safe purchase for me;  others may prefer to wait until the first public version is released, to verify.

On the other hand, it really is an awesome little game and Farbs is a good guy who absolutely deserves adulation and large wads of cash from random internet denizens.

So today I started work on the GraveShip, which I’ve mentioned a few times in the past.  In MMORPG Tycoon, the graveyard is treated as the intersection between the development world and the in-game world.  Everything that enters the world or leaves the world comes in or out through these graveyards.  (The only exception being new subscribers, who appear in Starting Areas)

The question that one has to ask, then, is “If everything comes into the world through a graveyard, then where does the first graveyard come from?”  In MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, the answer was “It just appears magically.”  For version 2.0, I have a better answer.  In 2.0, we have the GraveShip, which is essentially a flying graveyard.  In order to place the first graveyard in a region, you must first fly your GraveShip into that desolate region;  your AI developers are able to enter and leave that region via your GraveShip until a proper, permanent graveyard can be established.  In fact, the player can expect to spend much of his time on the GraveShip;  it can give a much higher viewpoint which is great for placing buildings and roads, and travels much faster than trekking about on foot.  My current goal is to aim to have the player spending approximately a third of his time on the graveship (which will mostly be building towns and large-scale map design), a third of his time on foot (which will mostly be placing small rewards and inspecting individual subscribers), and the final third of his time in the super secret game mode which I haven’t talked about yet.  :)

In this screenshot you don’t get a good view of the graveship;  that’s because I’m currently standing on it.  You can only see one of its corners, in the bottom right corner of the image.  Like most of the other graphics in the game, it’s currently placeholder, but functional.  In your button bar at the bottom of the screen (not pictured) is a Summon/Dismiss GraveShip button, which calls a GraveShip to your location, or sends it away.  I currently have the GraveShip spawning and moving to where you call for it, and the player can jump up onto it and walk around on top of it, but cannot yet actually fly it around (not much more work will be required to make that functional, though).

Other stuff going on..  in the screenshot above, you may notice (but probably not, as it’s rather subtle) that I’ve made some large changes to the heightmap generation algorithm, and substantially raised the clouds.  The upshot of this is that (in my opinion) the structure of the terrain looks a lot better, and we can now have much higher mountains before they clip into the cloud layers.  This change should hopefully also allow me to cheaply generate low-detail versions of the terrain further out into the distance, for very little extra cost in terms of rendering speed.. but I haven’t actually tested that yet.

Tomorrow, GraveShip flight, and UI switching.

Sorry for the long delay on this!  It took me about six tries to manage to upload the video;  it always stalled out at around 82% uploaded.  Eventually I had to copy the file to a different computer, and do the upload from there.  Regardless, here’s the long-promised video.

In the video, you’ll occasionally notice a single frame graphical glitch when I’m placing a road.  I’ve just fixed that bug, and while testing the fix I had a little MMORPG running where one of the quests — by random chance — had placed a large cluster of quest monsters immediately around the graveyard.  The net result was that any time one of the subscribers died, he immediately respawned in the graveyard and was subsequently pounced on by about five or ten monsters, usually far above his level.  So he’d die and respawn in the graveyard over and over again, until he got so annoyed that he’d unsubscribe.

I’m going to have to make the procedural generation of quest locations a little bit smarter, I suspect, in order to avoid that problem in the future!