NEaB Today

27 Jul, 2010

While Nasrudin works on the Inventory and try to create new kind of weapon and other ship pieces, I have been (very) busy working on the mission editor, which will allow admins to create missions directly from the game interface without any coding.

Even if this part is a lot of work, it will quiet certainly pay off at the end as any admin will be able to work on the missions / quests. The tool is also fully dynamic which means, as soon as we create a new ship behavior for example, the tool will spot it and allow you to use it.

Soon I will add the ability to save / load those missions and then Retor will be able to work on them to create the actual story.

After which I will work on the NPC which will allow some dialogs and based on the dialogs some new missions.

8 Jul, 2010

Things are going forward, and more and more tools are reaching what we could consider as usable tool. For example, the mission browser now will show past and current missions, allows to switch from one mission to the other and more. Also the target system (green arrow) will try to point you at the next thing you must do. New mission types have been implemented as well, and other small things are slowly improving too. Well overall I start to be really pleased with this project.

Now, as things are reaching some maturity we must choose how we will design the stories, either full coded, or via some admin tools. We didn't choose it yet, but we may end up having some sort of mix. What's clear is that players will not be able to create quests, and this for the simple reason that if we want to offer a good story we can't simply mix 200 or more different story lines. Sad news for those hoping to work like they was doing it in NEaB but as one main complain was the story quality we must do something better for this new game.

BTW just to give an impression of the code size, our code is growing slowly about 300 lines per day... and we have now 17131 lines of code.

Note: our ETA for the beta shifted a bit (due to personal holidays), count still 2 months before you will have some sort of playable game.

2 Jul, 2010

Game state does indeed save! That means this huge show stopper has been bypassed, and we can now basically work on both the story and continue the work on the server side support. I'm really pleased this serialization issue has been fixed, as it would have been a real shame to not be able to save the game state and therefore stop the game due to something like that.

To celebrate this, I worked on more funny things like "system voice" which gives you hints about what happens (shields down, enemy destroyed etc...) however even something that simple in theory took some time as I encountered unexpected issues like lack of support for some MP3 settings. So we MUST use 44kHz sounds and not some less resource demanding one. Too bad.

 

29 Jun, 2010

As we are moving forward, one mandatory feature is the persistence of the game, which means, you can leave the world, and when you come back you should return with all the items and stuff you had last time you played... or at least, without losing all the progression.

To do that, we need to "serialize" the game status, which means, we need to transform all the game objects into something we can send back to the server, and store it, and then when you enter again, load it back, and restore the status of the whole thing.

Sad news for Silverlight programmers, serialization in Silverlight is quite limited... and doesn't actually fit our needs. So which options remain? Well, not many besides coding all the required facilities ourselves. And I can assure you it's not fun.

Hopefully, after this huge work, we will be able to keep your game status (with missions, system ships and more), otherwise the game will be... a failure. But as our prototypes seem to demonstrate, we should be able to code it, it's just matter of time.

21 Jun, 2010

Nebula Rider (our coming title) is still under heavy development, and a lot of new code has been added. So far it wasn't a game besides from  fighting some ships around, and we are currently pointing at our goal of adding stories, quests and missions. Not a small task as it should not kill the performances, and yet should be fun in the end. So I had to switch some code around, reorganize it from a prototype form to its more final form, and prepare new structures to handle the missions. So, you may not have seen much progress on the demo site (for those that found it), but be assured that under the curtains a lot is in preparation.

Another heavy area has been ships handled by the system. Before we had only a single "behavior" which was the attacks of the system ships. Now ships can act in different ways, and attack even other system ships if those 2 ships are in factions in wars. A rather current list of behaviors we have:
- Attack at will
- Travel from A to B
- Travel from A to B and loop
- Defend something
To be able to implement some of those, we had to increase a bit of the intelligence of the system ships to avoid collision against asteroids for example. Still not perfect but much better at least.

We may introduce more behaviors before the beta but currently our needs should be covered. What is lacking is the possibility for some behaviors to jump across star system as users can.

So stay tuned, and maybe next release will have some missions to fulfill... who knows.

10 Jun, 2010

NebulaRider continues to gather most of my attention, we worked hard to make NebulaRider able to use00 multiple languages, and this without re-coding the game for each of those. So we will definitively support multiple languages at least as text.

Besides that a few additional changes have been made, for example system handled ships are able to avoid planet / star / asteroid collisions, the framework has been improved to facilitate the coding, and much more work.

Next step will be the implementation of the missions, and see how things works together.