[WIP] Ship Commander Project

[FireBoltStudios]

Hello everyone!

A few weeks ago I decided to start work on a project that I had been wanting to start for a very long time. But first I must confess that I am a self taught designer, so I am still quite amateur when it comes to games development. I have taught myself graphical design over the last ten years and have been programming and modelling for about two years now. There is a lot more for me to learn and I’m ready to delve into the world of community support! I am a lone developer primarily but I have a good friend that does the same, but usually he’s off doing some complicated mathematics programming, like fractal generation (complicated math for me!) or a complex random generator based off perlin noise. So for this project it is just me… for now!

Now on to the project, even though I am quite the amateur, I have a vision, and think that is paramount for any game designer. My vision is a vast expanse of space with planets, space stations, huge ships with hanger bays that launch fighters or shuttles, anomalies, nebula, asteroids(the list would go on!). Within this world of space there is you, A man or woman with no recollection of where you came from or where you are going. You wake up in a ship, the transponder is registered in your name which means you own the ship. You notice that there are two chairs on the bridge and there are several separate rooms throughout the ship one of which contains bunks for sleeping, cargo storage, security stations and a mess hall for eating. You soon realize what you have to do!

Get a crew…
Get some credits…
Get some action… or not, the choice is yours…

This game is be first person ship managing game, you will have to hire and manage crew members, who will have certain needs, requirements, skills etc. You will need to feed them, let them sleep, entertain them, decide what shifts they will be doing and where. You will need to make sure you take the right crew on for the right job. For instance, if you are a combat vessel you will want shield experts, gunners, boarding crew, If you are a scientific exploration vessel you will want scientists, engineers, robots? Of course you could have all of these different type of crew members… if your ship was big enough!

Skills will be dynamic, so you could train anyone to be anything, crew members will always lean a certain way when you hire them, they had a job before you hired them! Crew members will have traits that affect these skills as well. You can opt for a chain of command on your ship, when your crew gets larger and on bigger ships you will have a hard time managing a lot of crew members so you can officers that can manage ship departments like a Chief Engineer, Security Officer or First Mate!

There will be combat, but due to the scale of the project and the dynamic of walking around your ship, all carrier class (Player and Enemy) wont move on the Y axis (unity Y). Fighters and shuttles that you launch from your ships hanger bays/pods will have Y movement to show the player dog fights in space!

There will be intensive ship management as well, power control, shields weapons, engines etc. You can even turn the lights down to get that extra little bit of power from the reactor, but be careful crew might bump into each other because of the darkness and might spill there coffee over them!

Ships will be predefined but consoles and terminals will be heavily upgradable, In the form of programs that you will buy (or create) to install into the console. Example (Phase-Tek Light Control V1.0). these programs will directly affect the ships abilities and statistics.
Also there will be a ship operating system in the form of a Ship AI, you will be able to choose from male/female voices with different personalties and quirks, and this AI provides the framework for the ship/crew management UI along with other things.

You will be able to land on space stations and planets, maybe asteroids. Landing on planets would be restricted to a limited area, IE just the space port etc.

Perma Death…

Yes. There will be perma death. But with a twist, you can save the game, by the use of a Cloning Station, you need to pay x amount a month to the company hosting your data, so when you die you will be re-spawned at the station you saved at but you lose your ship all your crew (unless cloned also) and revert back to character stat’s you had when you cloned. Also you need to be in range of the stations comm’s as they need to know that you have died! So when going for deep space missions be warned that trip might be your last!

All in all this is a huge project, and so far I have done more planning than designing. But through all this dynamic chaos I have built a Ship and have done some interior. Here are the screens.

I really want feedback on the textures and lighting primarily. Any other feedback is welcome too!

This is a momentous project that will probably take years, but it is my dream to make a game of this calibre! I hope you people will like concept if not my content for the most part. I am still learning and would love the feedback of the ever growing Unity community!

[Artoodiitoo]

I thought first this was about commanding ships on the sea a la Ports of Call.

Visuals remind me a lot of System Shock 2! I don’t know if it’s on purpose, but they surely fit in the space theme. Maybe the colors are bit monotonous, but is this just a single area?

Good luck with you project!

[FireBoltStudios]

Hehe I did leave the thread title a bit open ended. Thanks for the reply also, I don’t think I’ve played System Shock 2! Just look at some screens of it and I must say it does a bit! My textures are high res though. I’m still not that happy with them, I think the high res makes them look bland, I need to improve my textures.
This is one ship, there is a lot more work to be done on it. Its actually a modular design, you could probably see some of seems through my amateur texture. The reason they are modular is because they are tied into a render system I’ve developed that turn the mesh renderers off and on based on the camera view port (What you can see).

[MattCross-CFG]

Looks good. In your post you say get some action or not so what else do you plan to add for they player to be able to do.

[virror]

@FireBoltStudios

Hehe I did leave the thread title a bit open ended. Thanks for the reply also, I don’t think I’ve played System Shock 2! Just look at some screens of it and I must say it does a bit! My textures are high res though. I’m still not that happy with them, I think the high res makes them look bland, I need to improve my textures.
This is one ship, there is a lot more work to be done on it. Its actually a modular design, you could probably see some of seems through my amateur texture. The reason they are modular is because they are tied into a render system I’ve developed that turn the mesh renderers off and on based on the camera view port (What you can see).

I guess you know that Unity culls everything automatically thats outside of the camera view, called frustum culling?

[FireBoltStudios]

@virror

I guess you know that Unity culls everything automatically thats outside of the camera view, called frustum culling?

Ahhh, I truly did not know that, I have two screens and constantly have scene editor and game view up, with a bit of recent research since you mentioned Frustum Culling I found out that it doesn’t apply it to the scene view so I wasn’t seeing it, also explains why I couldn’t see it working on my test build, I set up a camera over the whole area(Obviously that cameras Frustum was rendering all of them). Hehe, I feel so silly now and cheers for the heads up on that one!

Just a question in context, does the unity’s Frustum Culling allow for objects that are behind over objects? because I have taken out my render script and have got a fps drop in build when standing in the bridge and looking towards the back of my ship.

[FireBoltStudios]

@MattCross CFG

Looks good. In your post you say get some action or not so what else do you plan to add for they player to be able to do.

Ah, now I have some ground ideas of what I want the player to be able to do. The usual’s are up there, trade and combat(Options of joining military, Corporations and even some Privateering). You will be able to be a exploration/scientific ship where you will take contracts and or by your own devices to venture into unknown space, nebula, anomalies etc, to collect data and preform research and to map regions. You can either use this research to improve your ship etc or can sell it on the Galactic Market, note if it is a contract mission you wont get to keep the research but you will get a guaranteed cash sum on delivery, I might put the option in to steal some of the research with a possible failure leading to minus reputation. There will be many things that come to me, and maybe the community can pitch in with some ideas, I’m thinking space taxi, or colonist haulers too. but tell me what you think, and thanks for the reply

[FireBoltStudios]

@FireBoltStudios

Ahhh, I truly did not know that, I have two screens and constantly have scene editor and game view up, with a bit of recent research since you mentioned Frustum Culling I found out that it doesn’t apply it to the scene view so I wasn’t seeing it, also explains why I couldn’t see it working on my test build, I set up a camera over the whole area(Obviously that cameras Frustum was rendering all of them). Hehe, I feel so silly now and cheers for the heads up on that one!

Just a question in context, does the unity’s Frustum Culling allow for objects that are behind over objects? because I have taken out my render script and have got a fps drop in build when standing in the bridge and looking towards the back of my ship.

I have found out this is not the case, Frustum Culling doesn’t account for objects in front, just whatever is in the viewport’s bounds. That is why I was getting the FPS drop because it was rendering my whole ship because it was within the camera viewport. Might have to turn my script back on

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html

[virror]

Exactly, frustum Culling is only culling based on camera frustum and does not take objects into account : )

[primus88]

Well, you have two options for the FPS drop problem.
A simple script that checks if an object is visible and if not deactivates it or if you have Unity PRO, just do a quick occlusion culling.

On the other hand, trust me when I say this, coding the ships upgrades, movement etc will be the easy part. As far as I can see your project will require serious AI scripting knowledge. I hope you are ready for this, because it is not easy at all. Even the crew AI will be easy compared to the faction AI.

You will have to give the impression of a dynamic world (roguelike style, mostly like FTL game). For this you will need some modular, dynamic, faction AI, that scans for actions done by the player, controls economy, resource demand, pirate and enemy factions, station trading… etc.

I wish you good luck with this and I 'm really curious if you can pull this off.

[FireBoltStudios]

@primus88

Well, you have two options for the FPS drop problem.
A simple script that checks if an object is visible and if not deactivates it or if you have Unity PRO, just do a quick occlusion culling.

On the other hand, trust me when I say this, coding the ships upgrades, movement etc will be the easy part. As far as I can see your project will require serious AI scripting knowledge. I hope you are ready for this, because it is not easy at all. Even the crew AI will be easy compared to the faction AI.

You will have to give the impression of a dynamic world (roguelike style, mostly like FTL game). For this you will need some modular, dynamic, faction AI, that scans for actions done by the player, controls economy, resource demand, pirate and enemy factions, station trading… etc.

I wish you good luck with this and I 'm really curious if you can pull this off.

Thanks for the comment! I already have a system that detects whether or not the player could see an object and turns the respected object off, It was a previous comment saying that unity has automatic Frustum Culling, but alas I found out that it didn’t turn off the render for objects that were behind other objects, as you rightly say that is Occlusion Culling.

On the side of the AI, yes it will be very intensive and this will be a steep learning curve for me also. You voice a very good concern with this aspect and I cannot say for sure that I have the skills required to cover all of what I want at this moment in time, but this is a dream project and I don’t mind if it takes a long time and I have to learn a few things in the process. To be honest with you I was more worried about AI pathing, animation, and I’m terrible at organic modelling hehe.