Comments - frodeaa

Yep :D Tyrian is a great game with a great sprite set.

Re sounds: Yeah the bullet hit sound is tied to the bullet dying right now, so it plays regardless of how the bullet "died". I'll probably move this to the ship so that it plays when the ship is hit instead.

Re star: It's bounding sphere collision with the sprite right now, yes. Although it does grade it so if you're only slightly inside the sphere it does less damage than if you're in the middle of the sphere. The problem is that it's still far too high I think.

Re AI: Enemy ships will eventually know to avoid stars, but I haven't written that part yet. The AI right now is very very simple. I like your idea and I've been thinking about doing some sort of hydrogen harvesting from stars where you have to fly close to scoop up hydrogen, but if you get too close you're toast. The Elite series does this and it's pretty neat (especially since it uses hydrogen for fuel, so you can wastly expand your exploration radius).

Re missiles: Missiles actually have inertia. They use the same physics as the ships do, but their mass is much smaller which is why they are pretty precise right now. I took a glance at the link you posted and it looks similar to a principle I used for targeting in another prototype I built a few years back, which I'm going to reuse for this game as well. I used the Quadratic formula, but that link seems to use Quartic, and I'm not sure what the difference is so I'll have to do some more research. Missiles and turrets will eventually both use assisted targeting, but both will also come in cheaper non-assisted versions.

I've added an option to turn off the inertial dampeners, so you should be able to play around with that in the next build. I might put it up on Friday, but I'm not sure. There's little else new except for the installer, which I've spent the majority of my time redoing. I'll see if I can get anything else done by then.

Re sounds: I believe the shield has a sound right now, but it might not be loud enough. It's probably just drowned out. I still haven't quite figured out the sound levels and it's something I tweak on a regular basis.

Re sun damage: Yeah, I've been trying to spread it out more... It was actually much worse in the previous build, where it actually killed you so fast you didn't even see the shields come up.

Re bullets: I used to do this but I temporarily removed it when I added the heat seeking missiles I believe. Regular projectiles only travel in a straight line, so if you fire from standstill the max speed is only 9 or whatever, but if you fire from full speed, it'll be let's say 18 (assuming the ship is travelling at 9). Which isn't really an issue. But for missiles, if they have a max speed of lets say 12 from a standstill, they'd have a max speed of 21. But because they can control their path, now they're suddenly almost twice as fast as missiles fired from a standstill, even if they are travelling in the opposite direction of what they were fired from. Right now missiles derive from the bullets class, which is why they behave the same. I might come back to this in the future and see if I can solve it somehow.

I'm glad you're enjoying the game. I hope to be able to add the trade goods store back in soon, so players can do some trading and looting and be able to make some money and stuff.

The stars and planets are from other sources, but the Tyrian tile set is actually pretty large so I might be able to find most things that I have planned. For now it's good enough, but we'll see down the road I guess.

Re crashes: I'll try and include better error logging in the next version. I tried replicating the errors on my laptop after installing, and it worked ok, so it might be a specific error with your setup I guess.

Re mass: I'm definitely going to reduce turning rate with addition of mass, and although I've considered max speed as well, I'm not sure if it's necessary. I'll try and play around with it and see. Some of the larger ships I have planned have a very reduced max speed to begin with and will be able to add a lot of mass because of large cargo holds, so I'm a little vary of changing the max speed.

Re thrusters: Right now the ship itself has smaller thrusters (100k for Phoenix and 60k for Banshee, I think) in four directions (controlled by Up/Down/Q/W). The engines has a much higher thrust, but only in one direction (Up arrow). Right now the dampeners use the ships thrusters to slow down. I'm thinking about allowing it to use the engine as well if it's pointing in a direction where the engine would help, but it's a bunch of math to figure out so I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Re missiles: Yep, flares are on my idea list. And yeah, I suppose a weapon that shots "hot bolts of plasma" should probably generate more heat than a weapon that just fires bullets. I was trying to balance the chain gun because it's actually very good, even with limited ammo, but it does kind of go against intuition so I'm going to have to fix that.

Thanks for the feedback! I haven't decided if I'm sticking with the Tyrian graphics indefinitely, but for the foreseeable future that's what I'll stick with. I loved Tyrian when I was younger and I think they're really great graphics.

Re crashes:
Awh, shucks. That sucks. I wonder if it's because I botched the installer and it can't find some files, or if it's something else. Did you get a specific error, or did it just crash to desktop? I'll try and include error catching and logging in the next version.

Re Banshee: Yes, there's some balancing to be done here. The rate of fire should be limited by your generator output, and the amount of generators is limited by our module slots. Larger generators add more mass, so if you have lots of power and lots of weapons, you should essentially be an easy slow moving target. Rotation speed isn't linked to mass yet however, so it really only affects your acceleration right now.

Re space friction: Yep, you're not the first to notice this. I'm going to put the inertial dampeners into a "software" and allow them to be turned on and off. Hopefully I can include this in the next update.

Re missiles: Equipping the Banshee with missiles and chain gun probably wasn't a great idea. The chain gun gets really hot, so if you use it while firing missiles, you'll be the hottest thing around. A weapon cooling system will help, but replacing the chain gun with a plasma gun will make heat output less. The heat seeker is just the first of three types of missiles and is intended to be the dumb cheap one, and thus target the hottest thing in vicinity (including the star, eventually). The other two kinds of missiles will only target enemy ships.

Re drag+drop: Yeah that'd be nicer I think. Unfortunately I have to build that functionality from scratch, and I really hate UI code, so it's not on the todo list for a while yet. It'll get there eventually though.

Thanks for giving the game a try, and thanks for all the feedback!

The graphics are indeed from Tyrian, as well as some from AI War. Daniel Cook (the original artist) released the Tyrian sprites back in 2007 for others to use for free. Christopher Park released his back in 2009. More information here: Lostgarden.com and Christophermpark.blogspot.ca

It's still early in development so I haven't made a credits screen yet, although if I knew random strangers on the internet were going to be all up in arms about it, I guess I would've started with that.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm aware of all the issues you've mentioned, and they're all a byproduct of being in early development. I'm glad you brought it up as it gives me some specific things to focus on.

Re combat: There's a lot more combat in this early release than there will be later on. Most star systems will have little-to-no combat at all, although some of the outlier ones will have more. It still seems like it needs a lot of tweaking though, hopefully I can get to a point where it's challenging but fun, and not hard and frustrating.

Re missiles: For the next update the missile launcher will have a separate fire button. That way you can launch just one or two, and still have the main weapon available. You can also avoid missiles if you get your temperature signature down below a certain threshold (I think it's 50 right now). I also have two other missile types planned, one of which will never change targets, but they require some other legwork done before they can be used.

Re star: You're right. I'm going to try and tweak this down. I also want to make a "Too close to star" warning thing pop up, but haven't gotten around to doing that yet.

Re jumping: Yes, it's definitely lacking some feedback on what's actually going on. I'll try and get this done for the next release as well.

Thanks again for the feedback!