Powering Through

Today's image is our first draft of the first flying vessel you're interact with in any mission: The Carryall! This all purpose vehicle operates is widely distributed throughout the sector due to it's durably built frame and substantial power. Developed by the martian firm Consolidated Aviation, the GPAV-2 "Carryall" was designed to be a landing craft dedicated to move between Near Body Asteroids [NBA] and larger space carriers. After it's initial release, It saw rapid adoption with many civilian, corporate, and military entities, due to it's modular loadout and it's cheap operational costs. Internally it can easily house any main battle tank currently available on the open market, with straps and rigging built in that allows for the underbelly towing of the Mobile Armored Refinery Vehicle [MARV], and other similarly sized vehicles.

Powering up

One of the first things tackled, was a unified Task system. Each gun, solar panel, fabricator, and oil refinery will have inputs and produce outputs. This is partially to require you to focus on the needs of your vehicles (Fuel, power, ammunition), but also deal with upgrading your existing base and vehicle fleet. The task system handles this for all entities.

With the lasers built into your starting Mobile refinery the Marv:

A MARV in yellow, driving out from the base hangar.

Each laser will find it's target if the vehicle has allowed weapons free, and then by interacting with the task system, produce a task that charges each laser. Once the task is complete, the laser will take their shots (Lasers charge a burst of shots, based on the number of capacitors available to each, so it will fire five consecutive shots before needing to recharge). The balance for the vehicles, will thereby rely on your equipment. If you somehow get better equipment, you're vehicles will just perform Better.

All of this was primarily dealt with because of Power. Buildings are designed with specific purposes in mind, that should ideally scale through the life of the base. Solar panels are your primary means of producing power, with battery banks charging to hold stored power until such a time that they are needed to make up for sudden spikes in usage (Weapons use from defensive turrets, or maybe the use of fabrication facilities to build units).

This system, took a lot of time to get right, and it still needs some potential tweaks. Right now, it's allowed for the creation of new units and buildings to take minutes.  Because you simply need to add the equipment into the library and everything functions.

Arming up

As mentioned previously, this has also allowed for guns to work. Targeting in the game, will primarily be based around Cross Sectional Area [CS]. Larger, bulkier targets will present an easier CS profile. Range and turret rotation speed also factor in, making it so that you may outmaneuver or simply attempt to get away from a unit firing at you. As long as the turret can keep up and the target is in a reasonable range, shots will fire based on the fire control orders issued to units. These are 'Hold Fire', 'Weapons Free', and 'Fire-At-Will.' In Hold Fire mode, the unit will not shoot unless shot first. At which point it will swap over to 'Weapons Free.' in 'Weapons Free' the unit will only fire, if they have a 100% chance of hitting the target. In 'Fire-At-Will' mode, if the unit Can potentially hit the target, it will make an effort to do so.

The Marv, learning to shoot, manages to land multiple hits on the building to the right

So far the system in place has shown that presenting a facing with a lower CS profile allows for fewer hits on that vehicle, that turrets can be juked by faster vehicles if they have slower rotation speed, and that turrets can all act independently without significantly slowing down the system since it's mostly based around math and reference calls, and not physics based casting.

Terrain and Modeling

A more recent development, has been with terrain. For the first few months, one uniform terrain block had been used, but as time went on and we started to creep up on pathfinding, vision, LOS, radar, etc. it became obvious that I needed to start considering the map more. Maps in the game are meant to be craggy. While most things can hit at a range that is "Most of the map" those shots will be few and far between. Terrain will be unpredictably craggy. Canyons, obstructions, plateaus, and tunnels will be all over, due to the nature of fighting on accreted asteroids and the fragments of planetoids that have fallen about in the solar system. This means that the range combat happens at will often be much tighter than the max range. This is meant to push you towards the use of Radar and managing your own radar signature well, in attack and defense. If you bumble up a canyon and fall into a defensive line that does it's job and shreds your heavy vehicles; or, if you send a destroyer to clean out a defensive position and walk it into 4 launcher vehicles designed to take it down, that's your fault. You will have the tools available to you, to find these threats prior to pushing out.

In order to make all of that a consideration though, we need terrain to vary. Some basic blocks were added in that are lacking in much detail.

First test of a material mapped Destroyer model and terrain blocks

Right now, terrain and a lot of the models are very simplistic. The workflow for every body is that it's sketched, made in Magicavoxel, brought into Blender, materials are mapped, slopes are added, UV is remapped, and then everything is exported and brought into Unity. It's somewhat time consuming but honestly a lot more enjoyable than I'd ever figured it would be. Most models are on their first draft (See above), with a few having been taken through second drafts based on what I've learned since I first made them.

Terrain will invariably go through the same iterative process. For now, flat blocks are best, because they are easily placed and low poly. The basic shape of them will be used continuously as it's intended that there be multiple tilesets for maps like techscapes for space based platforms, asteroid surfaces, and even location interiors.

The blocks being in is important because it builds a foundation for the next major initiatives for the game.

The Next Step

Pathing, Line of Sight, Wave Function Collapse, and a heap of minor refactors designed to fill in some current mechanical gaps are all going to be the focus for the next while. The interplay of all of these mechanics is such that tackling them all together means that once I am out the other end here, the game would be a good way towards being a minimum viable product that I can play and test. There's a whole heap of features to be added into the systems I already have: I still need to work out vehicles that use drones to perform their functions, I need buildings to construct a template that gets built, I need to make orders for vehicles that are built at the appropriate building, upgrades need to be built and placed on existing vehicles, etc. But, all of this can stand on the shoulders of what I have today. Getting the last bit of the undeveloped core features in place will mean that as the above things go in I can actively test them holistically in the context of the game.