Spirit of the Stars

Almost all of the work on the third campaign is done.

I spent most of the week on Mission 9, this was one of the most complex missions, because it uses Wave Function Collapse to create a dynamic maze for the player to fly through.

This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought though.

I also added some additional elements to Mission 9, and I got most of Mission 10 done too.

Mission 10 is the last mission in the campaign, and there are some elements that are unique to this mission that I had to add in.

The testing for this worked well.

Now, all that is left is some testing and debugging, and some other minor tasks, etc.

Additional testing has uncovered a few areas where the game mechanics need improvement. One of these areas is that adding multiple cities to the world at the same time causes performance issues, but when I limit the world to generating just one city, sometimes the game will create a city further from the player first, and then not create the city closest to the player. This means that the player can save in a city, and then load the game and the city they were in won’t appear.

This is something that I will need to look at later.

However, in general, everything seems to be working very well!

The next goal is to fix the few remaining bugs and issues from the story missions.

I have finished the 8th mission out of the 10 missions in the third campaign.

This one was relatively easy, but there were still some new mechanics that I had to add involving gravity vectors, jetpack velocity, and walking on 3D objects.

Walking on 3D objects is an issue I have struggled with before. I want the player to be able to walk on the exterior hull of starships, etc, and have the gravity vector point down into the hull. This is difficult to do, because if I point the gravity vector toward the center of the ship, the players position will be “slanted” toward the center. If I point it toward the surface normal of the surface they are walking on then the gravity will suddenly shift every time they walk over an uneven surface.

I eventually a solution that works fairly well. I simply consider the object as a cube, and get the “face” of the cube that the player is on, then use the upvec of that face as the gravity direction. As the player moves around the object, change the upvec gradually (Using slerp). This is crude, and likely only works for generally square shaped objects, like starships, but it works ok. For more rounded objects, simply pointing the gravity vector towards the center might work better.

I have also started work on Mission 9. I thought that this wouldbe one of the most complex missions in terms of mechanics, since it involves generating a section of geometry procedurally using Wave Function Collapse.

However, in actual fact, preliminary research and testing has gone very well, and it may not actually be as difficult as I thought!

I am hopeful that I will get this mission and the last one done in the next few weeks.

I have now finished 7 of the 10 or so missions that will be in the third campaign in Spiritus Astrum.

I am still working with simple programmer art, and I have not added all of the story triggers, etc, etc, but I am making good progress.

I have made improvements to the NPC’s and AI in the campaign missions to hopefully add some more depth to the story and gameplay, as well as fixed some bugs, etc.

I was concerned about the AI navgrids, etc, since I spent a lot of time adding my own custom extensions to the A* pathfinding project (Designed to work better for non y-up, dynamic worlds), but they actually work fine. There is one minor issue where a graph will not generate properly if another graph is being created at the same time, but this is not serious.

I have also improved the story logic slightly.

The next goal is to try to finish all of the missions with the next few weeks. One of them in particular will be quite difficult.

I completed two more missions in the campaign. There will be about 10 missions in total, I have completed 5 of them, and I am working on the 6th.

So far they are working out very well. I am just working on the prototyping and core mechanics for now, but I am confident that the campaign should be fun to play.

I have added new enemy types, as well as made improvements to the navigation menus to make the space combat scenes work better.

In addition to this, I have improved the enemy AI.The AI will now attack rival factions in addition to the player.

There are still some core mechanics to add, including some quite complex ones (Involving Wave Function Collapse), and I have some bugs to fix, etc, but I am making good progress.

I have completed another full mission in the new campaign.

This one took a long time to do, since it involved travelling to a planet and generating a navmesh, and then spawning NPC’s and issuing commands. The game has code to do this, but it didn’t cover this use case, so I had to make some complex changes.

I have also made improvements to the character creator system, so that I can create not only random NPC’s, but specific characters and character types as well (Ie, characters wearing the same uniforms, etc).

There was a lot of work involved with this particular story, but it works quite well, and I can reuse the mechanics that I added in other stories.

The next goal is to continue with the missions in the current campaign, there are quite a few left to do.

I have begun working on the implementation of the third main story for Spiritus Astrum.

The first two missions of the new story are now basically done. The artwork is not done yet, I am just using placeholder art, but the triggers and code for the first two missions are done.

I have added multiple enemy types, objectives, mission types, zone changes, and placeholders for story scenes, etc.

In addition, I have improved and extended the AI and space combat features in the game (Although I haven’t done any balancing yet).

My plan is to try to get the entire story done at some point next month, and then I can spend some time testing and retesting it before working on the artwork.

So far, it seems to be going well, and it seems quite promising.

There is, however, a LOT of work needed with this, from adding more missions, to bug fixes, balancing/tweaking, and adding story sections, and of course, the artwork.

I have now added support for friendly fighters within the space combat sim. Friendly fighters will launch with the player and follow them until enemy fighters are discovered, then break and attack the enemy.

Enemy fighters will also randomly target both the player and allied fighters.

This should be one of the last core mechanics to add to the space combat sim.

There were some issues getting these changes to work, but preliminary testing has gone well.

There are still a few bugs to fix, but one of these is intermittent, and difficult to pin down.

I have also added quite a few new features to the story mission itself, as well as bug fixes, improvements, etc.

The next goal is to continue testing and improving the space combat sim, and then begin assembling the new story quest, then work on the artwork, etc.

I have mostly completed the core mechanics changes for the new story that I am working on.

I am adding a new capital ship, which, while not directly controllable by the player, will need to move over long distances and high speeds. It will also need to change zones (Star Systems).

The player will also need to be able to leave and reenter this ship in various types of vehicles over the course of the story.

There is a lot of testing to be done on this, but I think that I got most of the core mechanics to work this week.

I had some major issues with storing the correct location on the server, since the game is currently not properly setup for multiple capital ship control objects (This is a feature I intend to add later).

However, I believe I have fixed these issues now, and the system seems to work very well.

It is now possible for capital ships to change star systems and fly to planets, and it is possible for the playe to enter and leave the capital ship in a vehicle. This is all saved persistently on the server.

I have also made some improvements to the code to make it easier to add and manage new storylines in the future.

I am currently working on adding another control object for the new story.

The player won’t be able to control this directly (Like the existing capital ship), however it will serve as the main capital ship for the player for the duration of the new story.

It is possible to launch and retrieve small fighter craft from the new control object, and I am now working on extensive testing of the new mechanics that I have added here.

This new control object has involved extensive changes to the existing system, which will require a lot of debugging.

Most of the initial setup and story code is working, but the problem now is the floating origin system. There are some issues with the positions of the player objects not being set correctly, etc, due to the changes to the core mechanics.

I also had some issues with server paging, as well as the physics system, etc.

I have an extensive set of tests that I want to run, which I hope to finish next week. I can then continue with the new story elements.

Most of the code for the new space combat mechanics is done. I had some issues with projectiles, not working properly with the floating origin system, but I have finally solved these issues.

I have added new features and UI improvements to the space combat system, as well as guided missiles (For both players and enemies) and other projectile types.

In addition, I have improved and extended the existing decoy and electronic countermeasures systems to work with the new mechanics.

I am now working on adding the new player-controlled fighter craft. The artwork is not yet finished, but I am adding the code for it, and so far, it is working well.

Players should be able to customise their weapon loadout, etc, with the new vessel.

So far, this is all progressing well.

The next step is to add a new capital ship to the game, this will be difficult, because so far, the game only contains one capital ship, so adding a second will require changes to the core mechanics.