Endless Void (Space Combat Sim)

Well, I started this project a while ago and first I posted my progress to the "small WIPs that do not need their own thread" thread, but now I feel that I definately WILL continue developing this game... and since it's not that small I decided to start an own thread for it.


The name "Endless Void" is just a working title and could be changed in the future. My goal is to create a mixture of Privateer, Freelancer, Wing Commander, XWing vs. Tie-Fighter AND Eve Online. Yes, one of those is a MMO and that's what I'm dreaming of. I don't know if I can manage to go that far, but it's on my wishlist. At least I want to reach a similar level of complexity like Eve Online but mixed with a more action based gameplay...


WIP 01:
This is a video of my first WIP so that you know what you can expect from it:

WIP 02:
- accidently deleted screen shots and web player -

WIP 03:
- accidently deleted screen shots and web player -

Looking forward to your answers, and greetings from Germany ;-)

 

It has been suggested before but i also recommend the overhaul of the mousemovement:
in your current implementation you need to put the mousecursor on the exact middle pixel of the screen in order to fly straight.

You could do:
-read the mouse axis input as a rotation offset, so you get a targetRotation that differs from your current rotation
-lerp to that targetRotation, or better: RotateTowards (so you can't rotatate by an insane amount of degree by moving the mouse very fast).
-keep in mind that you rotate relative to the ship, not the world
-i would hide the cursor and make a 2 hud rectangles or circles
--the first is directly attached to your shipfront
--the second is attached to the target rotation, so you always see where your ship is trying to rotate to

-i think i remember the behavior of RotateTowards only limits the maximal rotationSpeed which is appreciable in your game
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Quaternion.RotateTowards.html
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Vector3.RotateTowards.html

-you can disable rightclickmenu when you build the webplayer

 

Yep, mouse movement will be changed in the next step including a dead zone in the middle and a direction indicator to visualize in which direction the ship tries to turn to... I have already planned that ;-) thanks for the feedback

 

The project is progressing although I didn't have much time since my last posts... meanwhile I have had a look at procedural planets and developed such dynamically generated and full sized planets myself... I didn't want to just buy such an asset from the asset store because this way I could learn and improve my understanding of how such algorithms work...

Here's what my first procedural planet looks like:

earth-like texturing:












lava planet texturing:









Btw. the graphics card is a nVidia 9500 GT so framerate is quite good ;-)


Still there's much to do I think:
1) planets need an atmosphere... I just don't have an idea about how to achieve this...
2) my planets contain a lot of sectors... each of those is a separate mesh... at the borders of those meshes there's color differences which are a result of different lighting or so... don't know how to fix that at the moment but I'm looking for a solution...
3) fogging... I think I should have a closer look at shader programming
4) different shaders for water and landmass... well... mh... I think I'll have to split the meshes into 2 separate ones to be able to apply a water shader
5) clouds... I want clouds... moving clouds ;-)
6) vegetation: trees, grass... hm... will certainly be interesting to watch the framerate drop ;-)

Mmh still a lot to do but fortunately it's quite a lot of fun developing this... looking forward to your opinions ;-)