Xeno Versus:Space Melee Vids/Pics...

Hey, an update!

First of all, I didn't think it would be this many months since my last post. For some reason, I thought a couple terms of full-time electrical engineering grad school would be "easy" and I'd have lots of "spare time." Nonetheless, I'm finally back to updating my beloved Xeno Versus, as well as job-hunting (I'm broke, tuition will do that to you), and prepping for my wedding in August. Yes, it will be a rich, full summer.

Sooooo.... I'll start off by saying that sometime in March I went out and got feedback from a variety of sources on XVS. The feedback ranged from gameplay, to ideas for weapons, to complaints about the GUI, etc... and I listened! For example, I am in the process of finishing the re-done ship selection menu. You can click on the small image to see the full-resolution version.



There are several nice things about this setup.

A) All 4 players can simultaneously choose their ships
B) Any input can be assigned to any player
C) It could theoretically support downloadable ships (since no limit on screen space any more)
D) It's faster than the old selection interface
E) It automatically forces you to have a valid fleet (that is, the rings can only be filled in order)
F) Simpler/more intuitive for both ship/level selection

As you'll notice, I've for right now committed to a Xbox 360 controller. (Note: I really want to fix my icon for it. I misplaced the d-pad and right stick. Ugh!) Though I think a button-map and alternative button images for a different controller are fully possible. I can see myself at least doing a Logitech mapping as an option. I honestly would love to do tons of custom mappings, but that's probably too big of a time-consumer to do.

What's not visible in the picture is the amount of internal code cleanup I've done. I now understand Torque's scripting language much better and have been able to considerably shrink large chunks of inefficient code.

Sadly, I have no update on the levels. The 'Rocky Rings' board still has no rocks. And the AI has yet to improve. A professor of mine convinced me that artificial neural nets could make a nice basis for an AI. I will say that while I produced very smooth tracking/evading controllers, I was overall very disappointed with the result of my term's-worth of work. I will probably end up writing an FSM with a few configurable parameters for ship/weapon properties and call it good. The big challenge of the AI is that there are, right now, 27 distinct ships. Each have 3 unique configurations. (See example pictures.) This means the AI has to work for basically 81 ships. Obviously, balancing is an issue here as well. Right now, some battles between two very different ships are a blast, while others are tedious.


Finally, here are a couple videos: one from February, one from today. The low-resolution conversion of the fraps video clips out a lot of cool details. For example, several ships launch "mini-ships," which are AI-driven baby attackers that chase down your enemy for you. There are also a few powerups floating around, but it's not clear what they are in the 2nd video.

Feb: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKRt3z8v-04
Jun: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQJncaba7jc

Overall this project has been much more complex than I'd originally thought. Part of that is I allowed feature-creep for a little too long. (I've since cut many ideas out.) Part is I just underestimated how complex it could get.

On a separate note, I do have a far simpler game in the pipeline: mini-chess. This is a miniaturized version of the classic board game, complete with a solid AI and easy to use GUI. I wrote the AI as a term project and a friend of mine is doing the art. It's virtually done, unless we decided to put network support in. If I put a theme-changer into MC, you can bet a XVS theme will be an option. :)