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.
Just testing the landscape here, seeing how many ships my PC(s) could support before crumbling. My laptop (with a decent discreet GPU) started seeing a juddery 24-30FPS (with FRAPS on) the Desktop loved it at a solid 60, my code is already pretty tight so I'm going to have to strike a balance between epic space battles and ever so considerate portability. The flak cannons probably are a bit excessive if I'm honest... It's important to note that this isn't the way the game will be played, orders will be issued en-mass, I just haven't programmed the mechanic in yet (yes I like the pretty lasers too much!)
Actually, thinking about what I've posted above my poor macbook was trying to push pixels at 1080p to an external monitor, that's something its not good at with optimised titles even!
Nice work, but I'm a bit concerned about the the weapons firerate, even if it looks cool, it easily becomes a huge hog for the CPU to process, not even mentioning large battles and multiple battlefronts, just my 2 cents looking forward to this project, seems promising.
I hear you there, but I have some tricks up my sleeve to cope with that:
- There's nothing to say I can't half the number of projectiles but double the amount of damage done but i want this as a last resort really as it really does look cool when the weapons open up on each other.
- The ships won't be able to continuously fire like that, they will drain the weapons capacitor's which will limit the rates of fire.
- The ships will probably have more none rapid firing turrets anyways. Once i've firmed up on the mechanics some ships will loose pulse laser turrets in favour of slower firing (but faster projectile) particle accelerator cannons.
- Collision detection on the flak cannon will be predictive (or maths based) as it seems very expensive on resource.
- The flak cannons will first in bursts.
Thanks for the feedback! But don't worry, I want to be able to play it on my laptop and that does seem an adequate benchmark for portability.