Intertainment Games

If someone was to ask me today what I thought they should study to get a job working on video games, I would tell them MATH. Everything in video games comes down to Math in one way or another – building a model is 3D points in space (Geometry!), scoring points is of course regular addition and subtraction. And collision detection in a video game is all about Trigonometry.

Today we’ve been working on the radar functions for the batteries. It’s important that the radar system functions properly first, primarily because of the lock system. You may remember the lock system – the lock system is responsible for determining how likely a hit is to be scored against a target. This is critical for determining certain turret AI functions (as well as enemy AI systems in general).

The lock system is complicated. Complicated enough that we don’t want to explain it here. We are big believers that when you play games like this, you should rely more on skill then on calculating out the results of the battle before you have it. For this reason, you will never find us writing out some crazy formula like Lock% = Range * Gunners Consumption of {Inserted Caffeinated Beverage Here} / {Random Value derived from Programmers hours of sleep for last week – likely a single digit number}. Will you be able to guess at them? Of course, but we aren’t going to tell you what they are.

The long and the short of it (that’s funny, and you’ll see why in a moment) is that it mostly comes down to range. (See? See how it’s funny now? Okay, maybe not.) But it also comes down to the settings on your radar. The radar has three different modes it can operate in: Track, Scan, and Disabled.

Disabled radar mode is painfully obvious – the Radar is off. This will reduce your radar signature to the enemy, important if you’re trying to sneak through a system. Track allows you to lock up and see only a single target – this mode will blast radar waves at the target and increase your lock percentage, but at the expense of not detecting new targets…or alerting you to them. If you are operating in a fleet, as you should be when playing Crawlspace, you may have another ally nearby with the ability to detect enemies for you in which case this is not an issue. But you’d better not try this alone.Scan mode is a bit more useful – it will allow you to lock up to eight targets (four for each battery, and four for each squadron of fighter/bomber craft. (We’ll cover Squadrons in a later post, as they have not yet been implemented.) Your lock will be of a lower quality, but you will be able to pick up new targets.

In addition to range, the power of the radar itself will also come into play when dealing with locks. The more power you have blasting them, the better the lock will be. These are controlled through two settings – Sweep and Range. Sweep addresses how much area left and right the radar will look for. This can be anything from a 45 degree cone in front of your ship to a 360 circle all the way around it. The lower the setting, the higher the power of the radar.

The opposite is true of the range. The higher the range – the higher the power of the radar. But the range to the target comes into play here as well, balancing it out. However, if you’re sending radar signals out 12 AU’s in a 45 degree sweep and the target is right on top of you, well…locks don’t get much sweeter then that.

Until Next Time, Sink Enemy Shipping!

Something that’s becoming a common theme on this blog is talking about how to handle different types of player actions in a manner dissimilar from modern games. There is a fine degree of control necessary when operating any sort of military vessel in space, and we want to give it to you.

Aside from being able to target all of your weapons independently, you’ll also be able to directly control their AI actions by setting each battery to a specific mode.

These modes are a little complicated, and still subject to change (as everything here is) but our intention is to allow you to perform behaviors you’re not normally allowed to perform. Not all enemy units will charge head on into enemy fire, some will turn and run away. A group of light fighters confronting a battleship alone, for example, will flee in the face of overwhelming firepower. But how do you convince the enemy that’s in their best interests? In this case the answer is Suppressive Fire, but there was no way for you to know that! So we’ll explain.

Hold Fire

This command is overwhelmingly obvious, it will force the battery to stop shooting and the battery will not engage in shooting again until the order is changed. This is the default mode for all batteries. This mode of fire is for approach or stealth situations.

Restrained Fire

This is the maximum ammo conservation mode. This mode will fire every few seconds at a target, only when it is range and when it has the best chance to hit. That means if a target is moving towards you, it may not fire right when it enters range, but instead wait until it approach much closer then it normally would. The idea of this mode is that you can fire at an enemy without merely throwing out tons of ammunition in the hopes of hitting something, and more valuable weapon types (torpedoes, missiles, cruise missiles) will be more effective as they will be the most likely to hit.

The rate at which a battery will start shooting at this mode is determined by the Lock Strength. Once you have targeted a ship, you must lock a target to engage it. Locks can range anywhere from 1% to 100%. This number determines the likelihood of a shot fired now reaching it’s target. This number will generally start around 25 and work it’s way up the closer you get to the target. Batteries set to restrained fire will not open fire on a target until it reaches at least 85% lock strength.

When set to this mode, a battery will fire until it’s ammo is expended.

This mode is best set when you are trying to destroy an enemy to escape a battle – every shot will count.

Sustained Fire

Sustained fire is very similar to the above – except that rather then depend on lock strength to determine when it will open fire it depends purely on range. Once a target has entered range, the weapon battery will fire short bursts from its weapons every few seconds, maintaining ammo but also beginning to fire as soon as a hit is at all possible and stopping only when it’s ammo is expended.

This mode is best set when you are just entering an engagement and want to inflict maximum possible damage on a target before closing to finish it off.

Fire at Will

This command will order a battery to fire at a target as soon as it enters range and not stop until it is out of ammo. This is slightly different then the sustained fire mode above because the battery will run out of ammo much quicker in this mode, as it does not stop occasionally to rest in between shots.

This mode is best set when you are in the middle of a wild melee and don’t care what gets caught in the crossfire.

Suppressive Fire

This command will order a battery to open up immediately! It will begin firing at a target and continue firing at a target until it runs out of ammo or the target is destroyed. This command will deplete your ammo even faster then the previous commands, and worse, is not dependent on range or lock.

This mode is best set when you trying to intimidate an enemy from closing. This mode can also be used for larger weapons – such as anti-Capital ship weapons – for targeting groups of fighters the battery might not otherwise be optimized to hit. With such a massive amount of fire power going out, the odds are good even one or two close misses can take out a target.

That wraps up our notes on the various battery AI control modes. Stay tuned this week, we’re going to talk more about Target Locks and how to maintain them!

Until next time, Sink Enemy Shipping!

More fun with the inventory system last night, this time with most of the kinks worked out. Sometimes you just have to quit for the day and get some sleep, or you won’t get anything at all productive done. So let’s take a look at loading equipment.

The first step you’re going to follow here is loading weapons from the Citadel Station Secretly Named Station to be Announced Later. This inventory, as we mentioned in yesterdays post, is shared with all the other members of your team. If there are 7 guns available, it’s not 7 guns for you, and your buddy, and your buddy’s girlfriend, it’s 7 guns split between all of you. Once you’ve pulled a gun out of inventory, it’s loaded onto your ship. Loading guns on your ship takes up valuable tonnage space that can be used for other components to help improve your combat capabilities. This tonnage is returned to being available when you unload equipment from your ship.

In the image below you can see we’ve loaded four guns on board our ship. These are not out of the station inventory and can’t be used by other players in your group.

Before you can use any of these guns, however, you have to load them into a weapon battery. Every ship has four batteries (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta) that can be targeted independently of each other. As we mentioned yesterday, we are splitting the difference between letting every weapon target a different ship (programatically impossible) and every weapon targeting the same ship. You can see in the image below part of the ‘Tactical Screen’ that shows what weapons are available for loading, and the current target of two of the weapon batteries.

Once you have some weapons in your inventory to assign, you have to select which weapon  battery you want to load the weapons into (you can click anywhere in the general vicinity of the load out box to select this) You can see our empty load out box below (we’ve selected Alpha Battery in the image, evidenced by  the red border).

Once you have the weapon battery selected, just click a gun to add it to the weapons bay. You can see below we’ve now added two Medium Anti-Capital  Ship guns on board our ship, and assigned them to Weapon Battery Alpha.

Weapons not in a battery will not fire at anything, so it’s a good idea to make sure you assign everything in your inventory to a battery or it will just be wasted space!

During the development of this feature set we ran into a number of problems. For example, players can remove a weapon item from their ship inventory to return tonnage space, which also means it has to be checked against the battery and removed from the battery (we default to removing ‘extras’ from the list before we start removing weapons from batteries, but sometimes you don’t have any extras to be removed!).

We also needed the data to persist between sessions – setting up your weapon batteries is not something you should have to do every time you sign into the game. It’s easy during this process to forget the little things – like that we still needed weapons to show up in the inventory list even if some of them have been assigned, so long as there are extras in the inventory.

In the end, we ended up scraping two whole functions and adding a new callback to execute the battery creation process at the end of the inventory loading process. All our attempts to do it all at once ended badly, and if there is one thing we have learned it’s that decoupled functions are easier to modify and change later in the future.

Until next time, Sink Enemy Shipping!

Recently while working on an inventory system for Crawlspace, a discussion came up about the user interface that I wanted to share. We were discussing weather to implement a drag and drop system for the inventory. I should explain a little bit about the inventory system here so you can understand the following points.

The inventory system for Crawlspace exists for a group, not for an individual. When an item is loaded onto a ship it uses tonnage aboard the ship, and is removed from the group inventory. For items like Radar or Hangers or ECM equipment, this is the final step to equipping it. Items like this cannot be assigned anywhere except in their assigned ‘grouping’. Radar and ECM for example are grouped under ‘Special Equipment’. Reactors are under the ‘Power’ grouping, and guns and missiles all fall under the ‘Weapons’ grouping.

Initially drag and drop was planned for this feature, but after looking at the system we started to ask why. Traditionally in other games this is how we’ve seen it done – but let’s be honest. Are you ever going to drop a reactor in a radar slot? No? Then why not just let you click? Now instead of click/hold/drag/release you just hit a click – once – and the item slots into the appropriate grouping.

This was great for general equipment, loading up my ship from the group inventory is quick and painless. But what about weapons? Weapons, in addition to being loaded on your ship, have to be loaded into one of four available ‘Gun Batteries’ on board your ship. Gun Batteries allow you to take five or six weapons of similar or dissimilar types and group them all together to fire at once. We realized very early on that capital ships don’t generally point all their guns at the same target all the time – it’s a massive waste of ammunition to shot a .50 caliber machine gun at a battleship three miles off – you use the main cannon for that (or even better – missiles).

So we broke up the weapons into six categories – Anti-Fighter weapons,  Anti-Capital ship weapons, with a light/medium/heavy version of each. This way you can group all your anti-fighter weapons together, or mix and match so you have four batteries of weapons that can shoot at anything. It wasn’t practical – from a programming standpoint – to give players the ability to fire all their weapons at independent targets. You could be stuck assigning 100 targets to 100 weapons. And it wasn’t fair to force the player to target one ship at a time – this is a major draw back from modern video games. You have a massive battle cruiser with a giant main cannon and six point defense turrets and send it after a building – and it attacks the building and dies to a single machine gun trooper because it’s point defense batteries are busy shooting at the same target.

So for the gun batteries we needed a new solution – and now the process  for equipping a weapon into a gun battery slot involves first selecting the weapon battery you want to assign guns too, and then clicking the guns out of the list the same way the main inventory assignment system works. While a drag-and-drop system would be ideal for this sort of situation, we felt that it disrupted the flow of the game. Having two different  control systems to accomplish what (to the player) seems like essentially the same action means we have to write two different tutorials for managing the inventory system and the player has to remember two different sets of instructions for the same system.

Just wanted to share this – it’s interesting to note that sometimes the ideal solution isn’t the right one for a given game. We’ll have more on this after it’s been turned loose to our Beta Testers.