Gunship-X -- Strike SLAVE

Unfortunately, my Christmas/New Years vacation was a bit too busy to get much done on the project so...

Gunship-X is plodding along. Progress has been steady but slow -- mainly because I'm working on it alone and because I'm relying on a significant amount of "iterative design" to ensure the game is at worst not un-fun to play. It does get kind of frustrating sometimes re-doing a particular gameplay mechanic (especially one of your favourites) every which way until you find something that works, but I guess that's half the fun of it all.

So anyway... Here's the obligatory (admittedly short, but much higher quality) gameplay video.


The link of which apparently has issues with GarageGames markup code because it includes a hyphen, so... Please click the picture below to be taken to the appropriate movie.




This video shows off the newly remodelled Strike SLAVE and one of its three special-purpose munitions, the Cluster SPEAR. The Strike, though more fragile and slightly slower than the Assault (the one in previous blogs), features stealth systems and super-heavy weaponry that allow it to sneak into position and then destroy groups of enemies and/or fixed defences from a distance.

The Cluster SPEAR itself is basically a heavy torpedo-like weapon that on proximity to a damagable entity or on collision with a solid surface, detonates, generating a cluster of sub-munitions which shoot out and explode, inflicting not insubstantial damage to anything nearby. The cluster effect itself makes heavy use of the SalvoProjectile code I talked about in my previous blog and is very inexpensive to use (both in terms of CPU usage and in bandwidth).

The torpedo launch system was one of the gameplay mechanics that just took a while to get right. My initial idea was for the torpedoes to be mounted externally on the SLAVE itself. Though this looked good and was easily supported by my attachment code, it added unecessary complexity to the scripts (not to mention the much higher polygon count). It did look good, however. Especially when the torpedoes first "lit up" their engines before rocketing off at a target.

That nice-looking little delay while the torpedoes ignited was very annoying however. With the quick pace of the game it made accurately aiming an unguided torpedo at a target nigh impossible -- unless you were prepared to hold a straight line on the target till the projectile eventually got released.

After trying several different variations on the idea I eventually came to the conclusion that the ignition sequence and exterior mounting was destined for the scrap bin -- which is why this version of the game has torpedo launchers mounted on the sides of the SLAVE and no appreciable delay between firing and the torpedoes being launched.

Also of note in the video is the fact that the various explosions used throughout my game are now properly exported with additive or subtractive blending where appropriate. It turns out the default Maya2DTS exporter just doesn't support the capability to set either flag and export it to the final DTS. It took all of twenty minutes sifting through Maya documentation, Torque tool code, and a couple of Maya scripts to rectify the problem. All up it wasn't that difficult to add a couple of fields to a material which allow the player to specify the type of blending to use and then export the appropriate flags to the DTS. I'm kind of surprised no-one's done it before now...

Oh, and the higher quality video means that you can actually see the projectiles displayed on the LADAR if you go fullscreen and look real close. Wonder of wonders...