Monthly Archives: August 2012

Planet exploration update and terraforming idea

Posted by Brendan Drain on

The Predestination team gained three new members this week: a new concept artist, a 3d modeller and a composer have officially joined the crew. The artists have been working on  new animated buildings for the colony screen this week, and our composer has been producing some awesome sci-fi music for the game. I’ll properly introduce the new and current members of the team in my next update and can hopefully show you some of their handiwork soon.

This week we’ve been working on fleshing out the designs for the races we plan to have at launch, and I’ve been implementing a hex-based planet exploration system to go with the hexagonal colony system described in the previous update. Players now have to explore outward from the starting colony as you can only explore hexes on the border with unexplored areas. Exploring a tile reveals what’s on that tile (if anything) and pushes your borders back, letting you see what all the surrounding squares look like. Below is a screenshot of the new system in action:

This is the way it looks in-game right now and this is how you’ll explore your planet at the start of the game before you develop scanning technologies and satellites.

 

Terraforming:

If you saw our QCon trailer, you probably noticed that terraforming is listed as a major feature in Predestination. Our planet engine can morph a planet’s surface and environment in realtime, which we can use for things like bomb craters, raising and lowering sea levels, changes to how rocky a planet is, and gradually changing terrain types. We’re currently discussing how to use these capabilities for terraforming, and I want to publish some of our current ideas so people can provide feedback:

  • Each race type is happy on one particular type of planet: Aquatics on ocean planets, Robots on ice worlds, Reptiles on Desert etc.
  • On your race’s preferred planet type, there are multiple suitable locations for cities and all resources are visible and can be colonised. On the wrong type of planet, a race will have penalties, and will only be able to find a small number of city locations and resources.
  • You’ll be able to research technologies to convert some planet types into others, such as a massive reactor or greenhouse gas generator that can slowly transform an ice world into an ocean planet. Each use of the device will require a massive burst of stored energy, so the player will activate it every now and then when the colony has built up enough energy and see the change instantly.
  • As a planet gets closer to your race’s favoured environment, new resources and city locations will be revealed.
  • Terran planets contain ice, ocean, desert and temperate climate areas, and all races are happy on these worlds. Every race can colonise all the resource and city locations, but will still have the ‘wrong planet’ penalties in cities in unfavourable environments.
  • Terran planets will be delicately balanced environments, so heavy fossil fuel use could cause the planet to heat up and the ice caps could slowly melt, raising the sea levels and destroying valuable coastal towns. Nuclear bombs could also trigger a nuclear winter and turn it into an ice world, and heavy industry could pollute the oceans and destroy resource towns under the water.

If you have any feedback or ideas of your own, please feel free to leave a comment!

A brand new planet colonisation system!

Posted by Brendan Drain on

This week we did a major design iteration on the planet colonisation system. In the previous design, the planet was split into a huge square grid and you could send scouts anywhere to find resources. Extractors were built on the resources and they were piped to the planet’s main colony for use, so if you found a mineral deposit you’d build a mining station on it and the colony would then have +1 minerals/turn for use in factories.

After some testing, I found that it felt like I wasn’t really colonising the planet; I was just exploring it because I had to get it out of the way, and that’s not fun. Since I could see the terrain and knew where resources would spawn, I tended to go straight for those areas and there wasn’t much left to find in the entire planet. There were also unanticipated problems with designing a reusable colony blueprint: How do you know how many fossil fuel power plants or factories to build if each planet has a different number of resources? And what happens if the blueprint finishes building all your factories but you haven’t found the minerals to supply them yet? This week’s design iteration solved all of the above problems.

Residential cities:

The new design splits the planet up into a hexagonal grid and you can only scout hexagons adjacent to currently explored areas, so you have to explore outward. Unexplored areas are black so you can’t see the terrain, and the hexagons for scouting are huge so you won’t spend forever exploring the planet. Most hexes will be empty, but some will contain resources or suitable locations for additional residential cities. Below is a mocked up image of the city planner:

Tiny planets will have just one viable city location, and larger planets will have several. These cities will be fully independent colonies on the planet, each housing its own population and requiring its own energy generation, military protection etc. All of your important buildings will go in the cities, but it’ll be mostly residential and military. You can have multiple of every building and their effects stack, so you could build nothing but power generators and orbital cannons or mostly housing and entertainment centres to generate tax, it’s up to you. Later in the game, new technologies will give you more space in every city.

Resource gathering towns:

When you find a resource like a mineral deposit or research artifact, you now colonise it with a small industrial town. The town starts with just the extractor building (such as a mining drill or research outpost) and 6 empty hexagons around it that new buildings can be built on. Rather than always sending the resource to the main colony to be used, you can use buildings here to refine it locally and either use the refined product immediately or send it elsewhere for stockpiling. Below is a mock-up of an example town:

In a mineral mining town, you might build an ore refinery, a metal factory, a few power plants and a transport link to an orbital shipyard. This little self-contained town would then send metal to your shipyards each turn, where it’s stockpiled to be used to build ships, missiles, etc. You can build your towns  manually or design blueprints to save your designs and help update them later. So you could colonise a uranium deposit and select between blueprints you’ve designed for nuclear power generation, uranium processing for sale, or a  nuclear weapons factory and missile silos.

With limited space to build buildings, you’ll have to make tactical trade-offs between money generation, military defense, research and ship production. Do you sacrifice a valuable square to build a shield generator in each towns to protect it from orbital bombardment, or a weapon to help in fleet combat above the planet, or more industrial buildings? I’m leaving it entirely up to the player to decide how to use the system. When it’s done, it’ll have to be tested extensively to make sure there are no clearly overpowered strategies and there’s no single best way to build a colony.

Population control:

Your colonists live in the cities most of the time and are rotated into the towns for work. Cities start with a colony base that houses 1 million colonists and provides food and water for them, and towns start with an extractor that does the same. In cities, you can build houses to increase the maximum population at the cost of using squares. You can’t build housing in towns to increase the population limit, they always have 1 million colonists. It costs 1 million colonists to establish a new town so all of your population growth happens in cities.

Each town links to its closest city and decreases its connected city’s morale because people really hate working in harsh industrial environments. Each unit of population in the city increases the city’s morale because more people in the city means people have to spend less of their time working in the industrial towns. You can build entertainment centres, police stations and other services in the city to increase the morale bonus each colonist gives, so balance the morale on your planets with their industrial output.

Morale affects the amount of money that population can be taxed for and the chance of a revolt or worker strike. Robotic races would be immune to morale but also can’t tax their population. Communist races would force people to work in the towns, while democratic races might be able to pay their workers to reduce the morale penalty. There’s a lot of potential for race picks and new technologies in this system, and we’re still throwing a lot of ideas around about it.

 

I’ll implement the new colonisation system this week and will get a video of it up to show you the results, then I’ll get back to working on the fleet combat system :D .

Nebulae and asteroids in ship combat

Posted by Brendan Drain on

I haven’t posted an update in a while, but rest assured I’ve been making a lot of progress on ship combat system. Ships now have armour, regenerating shields, structure hitpoints and weapons; they can shoot at each other and destroy each other. I’ve also implemented the reactive strike system that lets ships fire when an enemy flies through their firing arcs and players can hit a button to highlight all the squares the enemy’s reactive strikes cover so you can make tactical decisions quickly. There are firing animations for beam weapons and projectile weapons, which I’ll put a video up of once I’ve built the hotbar user interface to show it off properly. Below is what I’ve been working on this week:

Nebulae and asteroids

This week I added asteroids to the ship combat system and built a new system for creating gas nebulae, dust clouds, area-effect weapons, warp effects and explosions. Any fight taking place in an asteroid field will have asteroids moving slowly through the map, disappearing when they reach the edge and new ones periodically entering. The video below shows a few example nebulae using different colours, amounts of luminous gas and amounts of dust.

Nebulae will add some tactical variation to fleet combat, some being dangerous areas to avoid and others providing a tactical benefit. If you live in a system surrounded by a nebula you could even build a specialised defense fleet to take advantage of them.  A few of the things I could use this for are:

  • Sensor disrupting nebula – Attacks on ships inside the nebula have a chance to miss, or all ships inside are cloaked unless you come close. This could be a huge nebula covering most or all of the battlefield.
  • Shield dampening nebula – Shields don’t work at all inside the nebula. This could also be a huge nebula.
  • Ion storm – Ships inside the area take damage every round.
  • Slipstream – Ships gain bonus movement speed while inside the slipstream.
  • Wormhole – Two wormholes connecting far-away points on the battlefield.
  • Charged plasma – If a ship inside this nebula fires or is fired upon, the nebula discharges a bolt of lightning on a random nearby ship.
  • Explosive gas – If a ship inside this nebula fires or is fired upon, nebula explodes, dealing damage to everyone inside the nebula and dissipating the gas.

Most of these should have a small random chance to spawn, and if a solar system is surrounded by a nebula there will be at least one of that nebula in battles there. Certain weapons could even leave behind charged plasma fields or ion storms.

Science vessels

Recently the team and I have been discussing whether there’s a role for science vessels and non-combat ships in a combat encounter. Some of the most awesome moments from Star Trek all involved on-the-fly science using equipment that wasn’t meant for combat, and we’d like to do that in Predestination. The idea would be to let you research a suite of science modules that can be used in combat, like a scanner that probes enemy ships for weak points. Some of these might have uses outside combat, so you might build an asteroid belt mining ship to gather resources and still be able to use it in combat when the system is attacked. A few ideas we’ve had include:

  • Nebula scanner – Reveals the properties of the nebula. The nebula may have a hidden property that you can reveal using this, or scanning it may increase its existing positive effects and decrease its negative effects. For example, scanning a charged plasma nebula might reveal the plasma’s frequency, giving your ships immunity from the lightning discharges.
  • Gas harvesters – Let you suck up a nebula and deploy it elsewhere on the battlefield. This could be hilarious fun :D
  • Asteroid scanner – Reveals the composition of the asteroid. Asteroids may have hidden minerals that could be used in battle. For example, it might contain explosive material that you could detonate or add to a missile, or a rare element you can use to increase weapon damage temporarily, or something that boosts your shields.
  • Tractor beam – Alter the direction of an asteroid.
  • Slipstream/wormhole generator – Creates a slipstream/wormhole between two locations on the battlefield.
  • Shield harmonic probe – Missile that determines an enemy ship’s shield frequency when it hits, letting your fleet ignore its shields.
  • Impulse disruptor – Creates and area effect slow or decreases an enemy ship’s movement speed.
  • Electronic counter measures – Could decrease an enemy ship’s attack range, give it a chance to miss, or disable its reactive strike.

If you have any ideas of your own for nebulas, area-effect weapons or interesting ship modules, please post them in the comments! We’re at the point where we can start making practically anything and I’d love to see what kind of ideas people come up with.