Shallow Space is a 3D Real Time Strategy game inspired by Nexus: The Jupiter incident and Homeworld. Shallow Space focuses on organised mass RTS space combat in a fully 3D environment. Ships in Shallow Space are nearly always grouped into Flotillas and Wings, and orders issued to these structures cascade to the subordinate members. Rather than stressing out clicking on the units or dragging selection boxes during the heat of battle, standing orders are issued in advance leaving you to zoom around, activating abilities and arranging support and reinforcements. Should the tide turn in battle traditional control is still available.
Tricky getting this part right. In particular merging it conceptually and mechanically to the tactical simulator, it's taken me three attempts over the past year. So I booted up Nexus: The Jupiter Incident and found all the inspiration I ever needed...
I love it, especially the 3D none parallel planet orbits! Though, could the graphical representation of those orbits have a bit more glow, thickness and may be some more futuristic coloring to it? Sci-Fi films and series usually nails that part very well.
Naaah minimal is best - I tried a variety of different lines, glowing lines, pulsing lines, animated lines. But actually, 1px lines draw straight to the hardware give precisely the desired effect.
Most games designers are terrified of 3D, i'm rolling around in it like a pig in ****.
Chuffed to bits with it.
The line starting from the pole of the planet instead from the center of the planets symbol looks a bit odd to me.
And maybe 1px lines could be hard to see with resolutions beyond 1920*1080px, may some more screen estate defined value?
(I had enough gripes with hardcoded absolute numericals in UI over the years, please avoid them :) )
also: Pigs dont roll around in **** if you give them a choice.
Just sayin' :P
> The line starting from the pole of the planet instead from the center of the planets symbol looks a bit odd to me.
It's a bug.
> And maybe 1px lines could be hard to see with resolutions beyond 1920*1080px, may some more screen estate defined value?
(I had enough gripes with hardcoded absolute numericals in UI over the years, please avoid them :) )
Sorry GL.Lines is 1px only it's a hardware thing and it looks great in 4K also actually.
Maybe I'll write it so it doubles the lines up or something, or maybe I'll focus on something more worth my time...
...and I'll roll about in proverbial **** if I wanna ;)
I wonder if it's physically and astronomically correct - if we take a look at Solar System, all the major planets are at one plane (+/-), only dwarf planets and asteroids are flying elliptical orbits of their own. If we take a look at Saturn rings or Black Hole simulation of INterstellar, we can make a very abstract conclusion that grvity forces are gathering objects around at one plane, probably, middle of spinning point.
It's a good point, I think the orbit depends largely on the celestial bodies pulling on each other which would probably see them all settling roughly onto a 2D plane.
The trouble is that it's largely boring flying your fleets around on a flat map and 3D orbits will give the player an excuse to leave fleets at vantage points around the system.
Interesting thoughts though thank-you.
Well, if you take a look at Jupiter dwarf moons orbit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter#/media/File:Jupiter_moons_anim.gif), you can see a lot of mind breaking orbits of 3D :)) Anyway, it depends on scale you implement. If you make it in a scale of Nexus or HW, where your fleet is a dot in a vast universe, and doesn't matter for real gameplay the structure of solar system; if you make scale of ORB or Haegemonia, where planets are just big beautiful rocks for decorations and it's actual gamemap, then yes, real solar system structure would be boring for playing. Or another options, like in SoaSE, where planets are for decoration, but also you need to hyperjump to reach each of them - that means that each planet is like graph dot, and solar system would also be just a beautiful background...
Well you'll have to wait and see on that one.
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