Template Space Combat Kit (VSXGames) [RELEASED]

Hello! I'm William from VSXGames. Welcome to the forum for the Space Combat Kit for Unity!

Looking for a package that will help you create any kind of space game imaginable? After several years of development, constant updates and a recent major revision to improve the ease-of-use of this kit even more, you can be sure that the Space Combat Kit is the best way to rapidly build your space game.

Whether you're looking to make a simple mobile space shooter or a complex space sim, this kit has you covered.

Asset Store | PC Demo | Mobile Demo | Video Tutorials | Documentation | Discord

Support: contact@vsxgames.com

Spaceship Controllers

• Customizable controllers for everything from small, fast fighters to lumbering capital ships.
• 6 degrees-of-freedom (vertical and horizontal strafing).
• Extensive control configurations covering everything from your favorite space games.

Camera

• Comes with cockpit and third-person views.
• Easily add additional camera views.
• Cockpit look-around.
• Add camera shakes for explosions, collisions, ship acceleration, and more.
• Third person camera collision handling.
• Death orbit camera.

Weapons

• Projectile, laser beam, homing missile, and turret weapons.
• Loadout menu with loadout saving.
• Create trigger groups and rebind them during gameplay (like Elite).

Radar/Targeting and HUD

• Built for performance and efficiency
• Target boxes (with lead target indicators), 2D/3D radar, and target holograms.
• Target selection (Next, Previous, Nearest, Front).
• Easily customize target boxes and radar icons for different target types.

Health

• Easily make anything damageable and explodable
• Subsystem targeting and damage.
• Energy shield with hit effects.
• Slow ship detonation (for those big capital ship explosions!).

Resource Management

• Add boost fuel consumption, energy management, weapon ammunition, and more to your game.
• Drive events with resource levels (such as exploding the ship if heat gets too high).

AI

• Physics based AI controller.
• Obstacle avoidance.
• Patrol, formation, and combat (including attack and evade) behaviors.
• Behavior system for adding your own AI behavior.

Modules / Module Mounts

• Create points on your ship where the player can load modules (e.g. weapons)
• Easily create new modules (weapons, health generators etc).
• Loadout menu for ship and loadout selection;
• Load and swap modules during gameplay.

Floating Origin System

• Handle large space scenes with no fuss.
• Handles particle systems and trail renderers automatically.

Objectives System

• Set up objectives for the player
• Set waypoints to them and display them on the HUD

Ship Enter/Exit System

• Easily enter and exit ships during gameplay with a character.
• Use third party character controllers.

Pooling System

• Efficiently handle many objects in the scene such as projectiles, explosions, and effects.
• Simple and easy to use.

Rumble System

• Add camera shakes and controller rumbles based on what's happening in the scene.
• Customize rumbles in the inspector.

Menu System

• Pause, game-over, loadout, and controls menus.
• Game states system to easily switch between game states and activate menus.

Much More!

• Loads of utility scripts and components to help you build out your space game.

Additional benefits:

Packed with features – build the foundation of your game in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, giving you the opportunity to quickly test new creative ideas and make rapid progress toward release.

Easy to customize – enjoy a modular, event-driven design that gives you powerful customization from the inspector. All the code is designed to be easily extended with inheritance, and is neatly written and documented.

Actively Supported And Updated – benefit from years of constant development and updates, driven by a community of users just like you. No support request goes unanswered.

Feel free to ask me questions about this kit, and I am always very keen to hear what you would like to see improved or added in the future.

Don't wait! Grab your copy of the Space Combat Kit right now and turn your dream space game into a reality

 

Seems pretty good so far! Managed to kill 1 enemy haha.

Will your asset allow you to aim using the mouse at all?

 

Sorry, forgot about enabling that, I don't use mouse very much! Fixing it now, should take about 15 minutes. Thanks for playing and let me know any feedback you have

Edit: Updated now, sorry for the delay. Use K and M to switch between keyboard and mouse respectively. Don't forget to clear your cache if you played the old version.

Keep it coming! Let me know what YOU want to see in this kit

 

Update:
Finished the Ship and Level Manager scripts in preparation for large space battles with numerous ships.

The Ship script contains references to all the publicly useful components of each ship such as the gameobject, rigidbody, flight controller, avionics, shields etc, meaning that virtually all the expensive GetComponent calls are removed during runtime. This is great for performance optimisation especially on mobiles.

The Level Manager stores references to the Ship scripts for all ships in the scene, and contains functions for radar target cycling such as Next Target, Closest Target, Freest Target, Target Under Nose etc. This means that all the ship data is stored and accessed at a centralised point and improves performance.

Next: Big space battles!

 

Update:
Put on hold for a couple of weeks due to other commitments.

 

wow, this looks awesome!!! I hate to wait when I spot good stuff. Any news yet?

 

@ikemen_blueD due to a few changes in my work/life I stopped working on it and I've been focused on other stuff. However you made me think about starting it up again! Space exploration and combat is my favourite thing in games so I will have to get back to this soon. Let me know if you have suggestions as to what I might put in there that you haven't seen in other kits. Thanks for showing your interest!

 

@Billy4184 Space exploration and combat is my cup of tea also. For now, I kind of like your Target system, your AI system. I would love to see more Steering AI behaviors, especially a large group of Ships, moving together, smart AI Space Combat, performance friendly for massive space combats, no fun if you cannot fight more than 50 ships at the time, mobile support

 

Yes, just before I left it I was working on centralized collision detection to reduce the amount of raycasting going on. In fact the whole thing was made with mobile in mind! The auto snap targeting a la Starlancer is essential also for mobile.

AI is a bit of a funny proposition, I think the main thing to focus on is reactivity, i.e. the enemy changing targets and prioritizing dynamically. Nothing feels deader than a zombie enemy that just flies toward you shooting! Apart from that coding the enemy is not very hard, although path planning and collision detection are sometimes tricky.

 

Cannot agree with you more. Auto Snapping Target is a must. Since when I shoot I want to shoot like a pro lol. Surprisingly, mobile user often hates too hard user control inputs, simpler, better. The centralized collision detection to reduce the amount of raycasting is really interesting to me. I work with a package that no needs to have a collider to detect a ray cast. It's okay. But, at the end, I still cannot avoid to have a Rigidbody for each AI. Anyway, AI is just a suggestion. I already have my in-house system. The more I play your game, the more I wanna it now I will be patient ..., happy coding!!!

 

This package is back on the burner, with a few changes:

- Cockpit view will appear in the first version, whereas before it was planned to add it as an update;
- AI will not appear in the first version. It has been decided to develop an optimised general 3D navigation solution in a separate package which may be included in this one in the future. Very simple state-machine AI may be added in a future update if it is highly requested.
- A lot of code has been re-written to improve architecture and ease of interaction.

Here's a picture of current progress (cockpit and skybox are just placeholder):



Please read the updated first post to see the current objectives for v1.0 and beyond;

Thanks to the people who have shown interest, and I am always very happy to hear comments, questions and requests!

Regards, William

 

wow, the picture looks nice.I'm glad you are working on this project. Keep updating

 

Glad you like it, the cockpit is just a quick untextured placeholder so you can expect a much more exciting one soon! Also let me know if there's something you're looking for in particular in case I've missed it and it would be a good fit for the project.

I did a little work on the skybox today to make it look better, here's the outside view. HUD not finished yet for this view.

Code-wise I'm working on the missile's PID controller at the moment.

 

Very cool! What about scaling up for controlling large (Capital) ships? Camera set back farther when controlling huge ships, and closer in for smaller fighters in 3rd person camera view? And a "bridge" cockpit first person view when controlling large Capital ships? With generic spots for crew characters manning stations? I'm working on a space sim game and about to scrap/restart my ship controls code in my never-ending game development - and this looks promising!

Support for multiple ships? Ie: so you can switch between multiple ships in your fleet? (I've been working on a simple formation system so ships will form up on a capital ship when recalled, and select leaders to follow when sending out fighters/bombers - so their AI only needs to make decisions if they're the "leader", and ships assigned to follow them continually navigate to their formation points unless ordered to attack something... Orders cascade down the chain of command: ie waypoints, targets, aggression, etc

UNet support? Multiple fleets (players) sending commands to their fleets attacking, resource gathering, exploring, etc

Turrets/weapon-groups?

That would rock! I'll be watching this thread for sure!

 

Hi @danreid70, thanks for your interest and comments!

1. Modularity and scalability is at the core of what I'm trying to achieve. For example, adding a new weapon to the ship will simply be a case of adding a GunSystem or MissileSystem script to an object, setting the parameters, and adding it as a child of the Weapons component of the ship. This should automatically do everything else such as creating a pool for the projectiles/hit effects at runtime, updating the HUD, updating the targeting system etc etc. I am making a big effort to make every component relevant to any general definition of "ship" from fighters to capital ships. Also setting the position of the camera target is just a matter of dragging a gameobject. However I do understand that there are quite a few differences in capital ship combat. Expect v1.0 to be 'core features of space combat' and therefore probably more fighter-based but I can see a big update for capital ship combat coming soon.

2. Multiple ship support is an interesting proposition, I can see that you're looking for team-mate AI that kicks in when a ship has been deselected (see my post below). I went a long way with my AI before I decided to separate it into a different product, and I'm still a little bit unsure that I've done the right thing by doing that. The reason being that I see quite a lot of questions from people unsure what makes decent space combat AI, not to mention wondering what the optimal solution for 3D pathfinding is, and the asset store is lacking in this area. I feel that a space combat kit should probably address this to some measure.

3. UNet support hmm, multiplayer is my weak area but I can see this looming on the horizon, considering how much it is a part of space combat games of this era.

4. Weapons groups this will probably not be added to the first version as I'm trying to keep it to the bare basics and get it out the door, but I have no doubt it will be part of the first update(s).

Cheers!

 

I wanted to add a post on AI because, despite the fact that at the moment I've sort of decided for the time being to separate it into a separate product, I want to stimulate discussion about it and see what people's experiences, wants and expectations were. I also noticed @danreid70 and @ikemen_blueD that you both mentioned AI in your comments.

AI Behaviours

When I started work on the AI (quite a while ago) I did quite a bit of research on the topic and found a lot of thread questions that hadn't really been properly answered. People asked what made a good spaceship AI and there were a lot of generic answers that were helpful but not specific. In my early testing I also found it quite difficult to code something that didn't feel flat and boring and didn't devolve into a continuous turning battle. After a while though I found some good information, especially from a guy who had worked on the X-series. So my current thoery of best practice for space combat AI behaviours is:

• Reaction-driven behaviour is far more important than planned behaviour as players can much more easily identify it in the melee of combat and therefore feel like their actions have an effect on the AI ship. Exaggerated behaviour is hardly ever a bad idea even if unrealistic (as a lot of game devs are well aware of!).

• The quanitity of pre-programmed interesting behaviours goes a long way to making interesting AI. Due to 'the more the merrier' being relevant to AI behaviours, state machines are not scalable and behaviour trees are a better option. However I'm not sure if I should code my own behaviour tree asset due to there being well-respected products on the Asset Store already;

• In creating such things as evasive maneuvres generating on-the-spot spline paths for the ship to follow (inspired by Kythera's work on Star Citizen) works well and is easier to apply to a range of complicated manoeuvres (I've actually got the basics of this working already). It is much easier than trying to determine whether the ship has reached a certain step in the maneuvre by comparing its current physical state to the starting physical state, especially when something like a collision might have happened in the meantime.

Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance

Surprisingly, the same lack of clear information went for 3D pathfinding in space games, which I thought would have been tackled numerous times. For example, a lot of answers just suggested extending the A* algorithm into the 3rd dimension. However for large volumes of space with only a small percentage of that volume filled with ships, A* isn't going to be optimal out-of-the-box. The conclusion I've come to is that the best way is a combination of traditional methods (A*, raycasting and so on) but that the bulk of what makes it relevant to space games is in performance optimisation and drastically pre-culling the information fed into the algorithms.
My theory of best practice for 3D path planning and obstacle avoidance is:

• It is hard to go past A* algorithm as it is basically proven to be the best path-finding algorithm possible. However uniformly distributed nodes will almost certainly be prohibitively expensive in performance. Manually creating 3D nav meshes also would be a nightmare. I haven't gone too far yet but generating nodes around obstacles seems to me to be best way to populate the node list, although I can see a lot of challenges here.
• Manually creating spline paths for ships near complex structures is likely a good idea, especially concave structures. Otherwise the ship should stay outside the convex hull of the object to avoid getting trapped.
  
• Raycasting is probably the best approach for avoiding dynamic obstacles as well as a preventative measure around static obstacles, and controlling the raycasting from a centralised information point (i.e., a script that only allows a ship to raycast if other ships are nearby) is a good way to reduce unnecessary raycasting.
  
• Another way to do dynamic collision avoidance is in a completely centralised way where the ships themselves have no ability to detect collisions. A script might calculate the trajectories of the ships to predict collisions and send commands to the ships to avoid them. This approach is neat and tidy but in some sense less 'realistic' and I haven't tested performance comparisons with raycasting.

Another important thing I've found is the necessity to control the AI behaviour collectively, or otherwise large battles become messy and unintelligent and the lack of strategy is obvious to the player. For example it is easy to end up with a lot of ships attacking the same target even when there are other freer targets nearby, and I've found that it is hard to keep the fight spread out as it wanted to converge into a small cluster with the AI I had. So I've done a little work on an AICommander script that controls this and would make it easier to separate tasks between ship classes (e.g. fighter, torpedo bomber) and enable a high degree of teamwork between the ships.

Due to the enormity of the task of combining all of these things, I decided to keep it as a separate product, but I would reconsider adding it to this package if it was enough of a necessity. It wouldn't be for some time though.

Questions and comments welcome!

William

 

Would definitely be interested in seeing that AI implementation as part of this package! I've been rolling my own, and worry about overkill. Have seen some great results in my own system trying to keep it very simple, but as you stated above: with groups of ships acting in concert, an "AI Commander" script does seem to end up being necessary. Otherwise even the emergent behaviors (using simple AI) does seem to just end up looking somewhat chaotic - whereas having a concerted overall strategy being controlled by a higher level AI definitely would make for a more realistic adversary (and smarter seeming player controlled/commanded AI units).

Would really like to see your AICommander code in action. Will check out your site (just found this thread and getting a bit of time to finally dig in a bit deeper tonight). What price range are you looking at for this package (and especially interested in the continued development ideas you brought up).

My plan is to store player data/inventory/scene map data online via SQL, and store Host info per "map sector" for which player is currently hosting (first player in becomes host, when max players is reached, new players launching that map area become new host... Ie, if no host data listed, player becomes host, else they join that host... Etc). That way seamless navigation through "space sectors", and in "local space" (scene), I'd use UNet to update just pertinent data per player and per units - when data changes... Pos/rot, thrust, weapon target (net id of target or position depending on target)... I'm rambling now... Sorry.. Lol

Really looking forward to the evolution of this! Could really use it especially with my current "revamping" of my command system.

 

PS, the vsxgames.com site is currently showing a 500 error

 

Yeah that's the thing, it feels like you could almost make a good system with just a few behaviours, but getting it from 75% to 100% means adding a lot of stuff. That's the way it seems to me.

And it definitely is necessary to add some teamwork-oriented behaviours in there. It would probably be possible to actually get some good teamwork by working at the individial level, by, for example, making an AI agent look for a target that is as free as possible, but without knowing exactly what their team-mates were targeting it would be hard to read which targets were freest simply by looking at the ships and their positions. So it makes sense to centralise things anyway. On top of that any combat in real life involves teamwork and tactics and radio communication so it doesn't make sense not to have some entity directing the combat.

My description of the AI commander script was actually more what I intended rather than what I've achieved yet. I was more interested in getting the fundamentals such as obstacle avoidance down first. And now the AI is not my priority until at least v1.0 is out the door. But as a space strategy fan (Homeworld 2 being my favourite game) big tactical battles are the nirvana of space combat even in first person, and I think a lot of space games just shortcut the work by emphasizing multiplayer and leaving AI behind, without realising that AI can often do a much better job of creating that cinematic experience for the player.

I've never programmed a multiplayer game and it certainly doesn't seem to be easy, so thanks for giving me an idea of what you'd like to see as it helps me see how you would like to manage the multiplayer aspect. It won't be a priority for a while though I imagine. It all depends on how the first version is received and what is most requested.

Yeah I let my site slip lately (and stopped paying the hosting) so I need to get that link out of my sig until I set it back up. It will definitely be up again very soon.

 

Started the VSXGames site again from scratch today, a little on the unfinished side but feel free to check it out and leave feedback. I know, I know, there need to be more pictures. Unfortunately I've focused mainly on the programming and left the art very 'placeholder' so I'm going to make an effort to bring up the art to an acceptable level over the weekend.

All updates will be posted both on this thread and on the site.

Cheers

 

Nice! And quick! I'll be watching this thread! Great insight above in your posts, on space sims & AI. Will be picking this up, and looking forward to more discussion and ideas here! Great work, Billy! Keep it up!

 

So that I could make some better publishing material and eye candy, I decided to work on the player ship and hopefully get both interior and exterior done this weekend. The style I'm going for is a heavyweight fighter. Here's the beginning of the high-poly version, lots of work to go. Feedback welcome!

 

OK I didn't get as much progress done on the ship over the weekend as I would have liked, but today I'm going to make an effort to finish the outside (including the lowpoly mesh). There's still some detail work to go (especially on the engines), but it is almost ready to do a first pass texture and see how it looks. Then I can get cracking on the interior.

Feedback welcome

 

Missile firing test:



The homing missile controller is finished. It is a PID controller (or just PD to be precise) with the ability to track a moving target by calculating a future collision vector based on its own speed and the speed of the target.

The missile also has a proximity trigger that detects when it will not come any closer to the target (starts to overshoot) and explodes, damaging anything within the damage radius.

 

Exterior finally done (almost). Needs a little more detail but I'm going to move onto the interior cockpit and come back a little later to finish it off. Also have yet to do make the lowpoly for the weapon, but it will be a separate model.

Ship is 4000 triangles in this pic, wearing 2k textures and rendered in Unity 5.2.

 

New highpoly ship cockpit.

 

Very nice!

 

Sorry about the delay. I spent a lot of time making art for this game but I decided that it wasn't 'gamey' enough. I want this kit to be more of a pure space shooter and have a general appeal and therefore the art should be arcadey and flashy, and not so 'realistic'. The core systems of course are applicable to any kind of space game.

Anyway, I've decided just to block out a level and put up the demo, and when the gameplay is finished and you're all happy with it I will do all of the art at once, just before release.

So, expect a gameplay demo in a few days! For this demo I am creating an asteroid field level with player ship vs. platform turrets. Let me know if you have any better ideas!

 

Looking really good.
Will check out the demo when available.

 

Pic of the shield hit effect...

 

Just came across this thread. Looking forward to this kit. Any "guesses" on a price range for it when it's released, and of course any "estimated" time of release on the kit?

Looking great so far!

 

Hi! Thanks for your interest. I'm working hard on it now, we had a period of severe blackouts here and I had some other stuff to do for a while but it has my full attention again. I didn't want to fill the thread with excuses so I figured I'd just work on the demo until it is done

I'm basically cleaning up the project and filling in the gaps now. I decided to scrap the idea of using placeholder art in the demo as I want to generate maximum interest when it first comes out. There isn't much, just a ship, a target and some asteroids. I'm also creating the sfx in Audacity as I want the HUD to give the demo a lot of atmosphere. I estimate the demo coming out sometime next week.

Release date is a little bit further on, as I want to write a short manual, make sure scripts are commented well, do some testing and optimisation and finalize all of the art. I'm working really hard on it right now so I hope somewhere around two or three weeks.

Price I haven't decided on yet, but I intend to start it off pretty low until all the kinks have been worked out and increase it as it gets more polish and more features are added.

As always, any suggestions that help me create a useful kit for you are greatly appreciated!

 

Not a lot of comments yet. I would hope that you can include some actions or integration with Behavior Designer, Playmaker, that kind of stuff. The biggest thing for me is just a good core space flight game with a lot of the essentials to that, which you seem to be covering thus far hehe.

I got this thread on watch so I will be... watching and probably commenting more in the future.

 

Probably because the demo isn't out yet

EDIT: regarding integration with Behaviour designer, first of all I'm familiar with behaviour trees but not that product in particular. My plan at the moment is just the core, but integration with other assets will occur soon after. I intend to either make an AI system myself as a separate 'add-on' and/or make sure that existing solutions integrate well.

Thanks for your support!

 

Sounds good. =)

 

Thanks for showing support guys, it means a lot! I'm working hard to make something that will be really useful to you

 

-want cool space shooter template.. waits patiently-

 

Looks really good.

 

Hey @Billy4184 - a few questions for you -

1. Do you have plans for seamless transition between space station interiors / ship interiors and space?
2. Do you have plans for Multi Crew ships? (AI, Players or both)
3. Do you have any plans for Players EVA (Space Walk)?

 

Would be great if your AI pack could also be used for flight sims or easily extended to that genre.

 

This!

 

OK guys the 'alpha' demo is nearly finished, it will be up in 1-2 days if nothing comes up.

I'm finishing modelling the cockpit, putting in sound effects and sorting out a little 'mission' to make the demo more fun. Sound fx is my weak point so I hope it is good enough to give you that space combat feel! I added a free look mode (Alt + mouse) so you can have a look around the cockpit or watch the asteroids go by.

@HeadClot88 thanks for your interest! This first version is going to be a 'standard' arcade space combat template similar to Starlancer or the X series. It has 1st/3rd person views, atmospheric flight controls, 3D radar, target tracking, auto aim, guns, missiles, all the usual fare. Depending on the feedback I get I will decide on where to go from there.

However, at the moment the main things I am thinking about are more weapon types such as laser beams, and larger ships with several weapon attachments, which means weapon grouping and things like that. The goal is to enable developers to create awesome space battles with ships of different sizes.

Basically all of your questions come down to having a first/third person character mode. I'll tell you right now, I'd love to do it immediately, as that is what for me makes space games particularly fun! However, it's a significant addition and it will probably come after I finish a decent AI system.

@John G. thanks for stopping by! I'm going to start working on the AI system as soon as I have a stable kit on the store. AI behaviour and 3D navigation is something for which I think there's a real lack of information, and I've already worked quite a bit on it but there's still a way to go.

The behaviours should be easy to transfer to a flight sim, since they are going to be standard dogfighting, formation and navigation behaviours - I think the only difficulty of integrating it into a flight sim will depend on how easy it is to steer the plane around with the AI. I'm certainly open to the possibility of making it compatible with existing flight sim products on the store.

 

Meet your foe, ladies and gentlemen

 

Very nice - I like it @Billy4184

 

Hi guys, a few days delay, sorry! I think I was a bit optimistic about how fast I could get some of the stuff done, plus I decided the player ship wasn't good enough so I scrapped it and sort of started over. So, ladies and gentlemen, here's your ride!


Cockpit will be finished shortly plus an attachable weapon.

Thanks for your patience!

 

And the WEB DEMO is up! Give it a go, and post any comments, feedback and suggestions here on the thread. Thank you all once again for your patience!

Quick Tip: When playing the demo, any time you want to see the controls, press Esc to bring up the pause menu and click on the 'Controls' button

 

Error:

 

Hey @MV10, thanks for checking it out! Have you updated to the latest webplayer? It has some stuff such as the new image effects that I think are only compatible with the latest versions.

 

Probably not, I think I've used WebPlayer maybe three times.
My 12-bajillion-pixel display means most Unity-web-anything is too slow to use.

Ran the latest installer, same error.