Under Steel Skies - futuristic hex-based wargame - feedback?

Community Showcases
1

New update, check the last post in this thread for a detailed post
Pathfinding, Moving, Shooting, and Damage are live!

YouTube video here:

Webplayer here:
http://www.electricrune.com/SteelSkies/UnderSteelSkies.html

Posted version 0.2, not quite a game yet, but you can see and navigate around the map.
Click to center on that point, right click and drag to rotate camera, mousewheel zooms.
NOTE: This is NOT Unity Terrain, this map is made up of individual hexagon tiles.

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Click the BOT LAB button at the top to enter the (shocking) Bot Lab, where you will be able to custom-assemble your units.
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Coming next:
Your spaceship landing on the map at the beginning of the level, Bot Lab will be accessed by clicking the ship
stats of your unit as you build it in the Lab, and models for the non-weapon modules
actually spawning a unit and moving it around the map, and shooting
(routines already prototyped, weapon effects prefabbed, just not implemented)

2

Hmm I just get a “Download Failed” when I try to play…

3

Not bad on the terrain, although it is kinda on the blobby side… :confused: (not your fault though)… what scale are you working at?

4

I understand your confusion; it’s not actually terrain, in the Unity sense.
If it were, it would be more realistic looking.

The entire board is made up of (in this particular map) 1600 individual hexagon tiles.
The blobbyness is so that the player can more easily distinguish the height changes, since they will be significant to movement.
I could make it more realistic, but I decided early on that I wanted the center 1/3 of the tile to remain pretty much flat (there is a tiny randomizer added to those points, just to make it look less planar).
So, the stair step effect is part of the overall design.

The scale is twelve units per hex.

I’m in the process of adding the drawn on lines of the hex boundaries, I tried to get away with just a Bump, but you can’t even see the hexes at any significant distance…

5

Bumping…

Working items list:
Ship landing effect at level start
Cumulative stats in Lab
Spawning units from Lab onto map
Moving (code animations prototyped)
Pathfinding (prototyped)
Firing (code, visuals, sound prototyped)
Faction selection - background on each faction, and their bonuses penalties

6

You need to fix the camera moving around the map. This whole clicking and dragging thing is glitchy. Maybe have it where I can move the camera with the WASD keys. That way you can have clicking and dragging for a thing of selecting multiple units or something.

It started getting laggy when looking at all the trees or rocks. Can’t tell which one made it lag since they were pretty close to eachother. Most likely was the trees.

7

Try to do what they do with overview-ish games like League of Legends, HoN, etc… where theres a little mini map with a square in it (where your camera view is) and you can move that square around, or click in a location to move that square to, to change where your looking. Or as Jibidiah said, use the WASD or arrow keys. The movement of the map is a bit glitchy.

Other than that, nice progress so far :slight_smile: good luck with this!

8

Thanks for the feedback!

I do plan to have a mini-map, and clicking on the map will soon be only for selecting and moving (once there are actual units).
The zipping from point to point effect will only happen when you command ‘Next Unit’ or ‘Home’.

9

Still working toward 0.3

Units will be on the map with the next version
Mini-map is iffy for this rev, but clicking only scrolls the camera when you click on units now, and the scrolling with the keyboard is in (WASD arrows both).

10

Looks very interesting.

11

Ah, the joys of pathfinding…

Actually, I have the pathfinding part down pretty well, it’s optimizing it that is difficult.
Planning to have the selection of a unit highlight all the hexes that are legal moves, but running all the paths was taking 10-12 seconds, WAY too long a pause. Understandable, since it was running A-Star paths to about fifty hexes…

I modified the function so that it can multi-path, finding all the paths at once, and I got the pause down to 1.7-2.1 seconds. 1.5 seconds of that is covered by the camera panning to center the selected unit, but I’m still on the quest for that last half a second.
I’m getting sick of optimizing this routine, so I think I’ll just leave it as is for now, and come back to it later with a fresh eye.

Now to work on the spawning routine, and get some units on the map to USE pathfinding :slight_smile:

12

A new version out, pathfinding is working, but slightly exposed now.
You can see the hexes filling in as the paths are found; in the future, I plan to hide this by pre-calculating, but for now, just be careful not to select a second unit, while the paths are still highlighting.

Also, new MiniMap, you cannot pan the camera by clicking any longer, now you can use the WASD or arrow keys to scroll the camera around.

13

Version 0.3 is out, getting real close to beta!

Click the ship to enter the bot lab and create units, which will be spawned on the map, and be able to move around.
The units have the weapons that you put on them in the bot lab, but firing is not in yet.
The pathfinding has been hidden behind the scenes now, but it still could stand an optimization pass.
If you notice any choppiness on unit spawning, this is the reason.

To Do List:
Firing (Weapon effects already designed)
Additive stats in the info window of the Bot Lab
Faction selection

14

Moving and shooting are fully implemented!
Finally something to truly test!

I wanted moving and shooting to be as flexible as possible; allowing for units to potentially move, shoot, and move again, as long as they have the energy to do it.
When you select a unit, the hexes that can be moved to will highlight with a lighter yellow color.
If you mouse around, you will see the path to the hex you are over, with a move cost displayed under the mouse.
Click to move there.

Your weapons are listed on the right, with the energy requirement in blue, and the range in black.
Initially, weapons are inactive (signified with a red border). Click a weapon to toggle it to active mode (green border); this will reserve energy for it to fire, and part of the blue energy bar will turn green, signifying that this energy is reserved. This will also alter the highlighted moveable hexes, based on the non-reserved energy remaining.

If you mouse over an enemy target, an arrow will appear between the current unit and the target, with a range number in the middle.
If the target is out of range, or no weapons are selected, the arrow will be pale red and mostly transparent; clicking will do nothing.
If the target is in range of the selected weapons, the arrow will be bright red; click to fire.
Hits/misses/damage are shown over the weapon button. Working on a better display for this info…

Click the END TURN button at lower right to reset your units’ energy and start a fresh turn.

15

Seems that machine gun is only working weapon? When u deploy with anything else, it has no weapons.

When you deploy one unit, and then another without first moving the first deployed unit it creates alot of issues :slight_smile:

Seems to run a little lagish almost? Not sure if that is the rendering or what, what is the FPS?

16

Thanks for the feedback!
I don’t see a problem with the weapons, just created a Tread with all the weapons, and they all worked fine…

If anyone else sees this, please let me know!

The only things that should be inactive are the Armor - Engine - Cargo modules.
All seven of the weapons (Machine Gun, Laser, Rockets, Missiles, Cannon, Railgun, Plasma Cannon) should work, have effects, and do damage.

I can see how spawning a unit w/o moving the first one will cause a problem; I never protected against it only because I never accidentally did it, purely by luck. :smile:
Should be a simple matter to fix, I’ll just disable spawning if the LZ is occupied.

The framerate varies on my end from 40+ zoomed in, to 11 zoomed out to see the whole island.
It’s not great, but I don’t think it’s too bad for a turn-based game…
It is because of the detail of the terrain, and also the trees. I haven’t done any sort of work on any sort of optimization or LOD stuff on the terrain, I know there’s plenty of room for improvement there.

If you are seeing serious choppiness when spawning a unit, or during a movement sequence, it is probably the pathfinding.
Right now, I’m firing A-Star pathfinding to every potential hex in range each time a unit is moved, and at the beginning of the turn.
I have optimized the heck out of this portion of code, and have come to the realization that this might be as fast as I can get it.
It’s not too bad, considering it could easily have to plot over 60 paths at the same time, and it gets there usually under three seconds, with minimal lag.
I did come up with the solution, however, and I know it will speed pathfinding up to be almost instant; I’m going to pre-calculate the paths by building it into the map creation.
It’s just going to be a chore to implement it. I had been tweaking pathfinding for a couple of weeks when I came up with this plan, and I was pretty sick of looking at that code.
So I decided it was working decently enough for beta testing, and focused on weapons/targeting/damage.

17

I basically dont have a “weapon” to select to fire. Tried it on a few different browsers as well. All to same result.

Yeah frame rate varies on distance viewed. Maybe cut off the zoom out distance?

I get a glitch when I move a biped unit second after i move a wheeled. The movement arrows show from the spot i moved the wheeled. It moves fine, just the arrows are from the wrong hex on the map.

18

Anyone else having this problem with the weapons?
I’ve tested it on five different machines now, and I can’t seem to duplicate what Sly is talking about.

The glitch you are talking about happens when you pick a unit while the first is still pathing.
I tried to put a safeguard to prevent this from happening, but it still crops up in some cases.
I decided to stop spending effort to try and fix it, because when I implement the pre-calculated paths, it won’t be an issue any longer…

19

If you message me your email ill send you pics. Their is just no weapon to select.

20

Can I get some feedback from anyone else whether or not they have the issue SlyKnife is having?

Anyone? Please?