Due to popular demand (well two people asked) I've put together a playable demo of the latest version of my asteroids inspired game.

To play is rather simple, mouse does the steering and firing, LMB for one weapon, RMB for the other. I'll let you find out what the weapons do but they are pretty similar. Mouse up/down for pitch control, left/right for roll. A & D keys give yaw control, W is forward thrust, S is reverse thrust. R is a special key, it is effectively a brake, you'll realise pretty darn quickly why you need it! (I know that's not 'realistic', in fact it's pretty darn impossible IRL but it does make it rather more forgiving!).

The weapons are 'kinetic' so you will need to 'lead' the target if it is moving WRT to yourself.

There are two spacecraft flying around in circles, you cannot shoot them or collide with them, they are simply there to allow practice flying alongside them, eventually (when I've figured out the AI scripting) they will be used within the game.

Shift-E selects the 'RADAR' range, normally it will auto-select a range but sometime you might want override the automatic selection. Currently the range value is not displayed.

The 'RADAR' works in the following way: Left screen displays an overhead picture, i.e. if you were looking straight down on your own ship, a blip straight up the screen is an asteroid in front of you, down is behind etc. The right hand screen shows the elevation of the target WRT to your ship, i.e. bar above the line means you need to pitch up to find it, below the line pitch down. The height of the bar indicates how much to pitch. Blips on the left and bars on the right are colour coded, the bars are shown in distance order, i.e. closest target on the left, furthest (within selected range) on the right.

The right hand side of the screen shows a vector display, it's a bit experimental but the idea is that the arrows show the direction of your current velocity vector WRT your ships orientation and the numbers below show the magnitude of that vector. Seemed like a good idea at the time but I find I hardly ever look at them! (especially since I added some brakes )

When you've finished blasting the first asteroid you'll be rewarded with another .. forever .. or until you get fed up or GG crashes.

There is no scoring yet nor can you die (I think) I've not quite figured out how I want to handle that bit. Also no storyline although I have some ideas.

Models are by "SolCommand" from www.solcommand.com with a few tweaks by our own GraPhix. All scripting by yours truly. Engine by some bloke call Lee, no not Bruce the other one. Can't for the life of me remember where I got the sounds from. 2d images from all over the place and majorly messed about with be me.

There, I think that's the legal bit done with.

Oh, if you see entities acting in a weird way, like appearing to slide sideways whilst decals go a different way don't bother reporting it back to me as a bug. It's a known issue with GG whereby the terrain, although 'off', is interfering with the entities, even though they all have physics 'off'. Hopefully Bruce, sorry the other one, will 'fix' this one day.

Any other comments/suggestions/praise, feel free to inundate me with.

Not sure if this link works btw, if not I'll find another hosting site to try:

https://1fichier.com/?3a0198ef44/

Hmm, scroll down and click on the download file link, just close the adverts that pop up. It will work eventually.

The idea is not bad, but playing a few minutes makes me dizzy!
I often find myself in dead spaces, where I can not find enemies or anything else.

Use the radar to guide you back to the asteroid(s), to start with I suggest only using W&R keys to fly around.

Space is really big and really difficult to navigate around in!

thank you Amenmoses I love it very addictive a great twist on an all time classic cannot wait to see what you do with Space Invaders

Added the enemy ship and the fueler to the radar:



Still haven't worked out any AI for them though!

So what have I been up to, well I've decided to go all Hollywood with this, iow I've dropped the 'realism' down a notch.

My original intention was to mimic the original games almost impossible to master flight mode but in 3d, this meant thrust in only one direction, retained velocity vector with no thrust (so the only way to turn around is by rotating and thrusting in the opposite direction) and wide open blank space apart from the rocks/aliens you have blast.

Problem with this approach is that realism gets in the way of a good gaming experience, i.e. blank open spaces with even huge rocks in become rather tedious after a while as does the lack of any real visual cues that you are getting anywhere (the Apollo astronauts mention this a lot, day after day the only indication that they were moving was the Earth getting smaller and the Moon getting bigger!).

Also the flight mode, although highly realistic, is also extremely difficult to control. Don't be fooled by Sci-Fi movies, dog fighting in space is just never going to happen IRL!

So I've decided to go the movie route and provide reverse thrust, brakes, and latest addition to give some visual cues to velocity is ... well take a look for yourself:



I'm quite pleased with this particular addition, and it's all done with decals!

Like that m8 very cool be pretty damn good with enemy ai heres another 3 sets of huds to play with they were originally for mechs but they should be easy to change

Thanks but I'm not going through all that graphics editing again!

What I would really like is a 3d cockpit frame to go with the ones I'm already using (based on your Titan set I believe, much modified as you can probably tell!).

I'm in a bit of a decal mood at the moment, waiting for Lee to get rid of the ruddy terrain as it is realling annoying me now, can you see the bit in the video where the Asteroid I'm flying towards suddenly changes direction, that's the terrain problem I'm having.

Another thing I've noticed, which I think Lee alludes to in one of his recent posts, is that everything seems to freeze every now and then and then carries on as before. This doesn't actually show in the FPS meter, it's as if GG is be interupted by something higher priority, I'm wondering if there is some underlying DX11 garbage collection or something similar going on.

Lee has said early next year he will ad a clean start level,when this update has settled down.

Dave

Hooray!

Pretty Cool! More things to shoot at is all it needs. I didn't notice, but does it keep score? Or is this going to be the kind of game where every level get's faster and harder? Or is this game just going to be a demo?

Haven't a clue at present, started it over a year ago as a tech demo and stalled when I hit the terrain issue, lost interest in it for a bit then returned to it as something to play with whilst the DX11 churn was going on. Maybe in the new year when Lee gives us an 'empty canvas' to play on I'll get more into it again.

For me the fun part is working out how to 'fake' things, i.e. give the player the impression that they are alone in a vast empty 3d space saving humanity from the threat of annihilation, that's what the original Asteroids did with a handful of simple lines. Space Invaders for me was too abstract and never induced a feeling of space for me.

So what I'm working on are a bunch of experimental things to improve the immersive feel, like the ball drop on another thread, with simple decal handling tricks.

Next up I'm going to start playing with adding some more audio; proximity alarms, weapon overheating alarms, that sort of thing, and some more instrument indicators (those blank spaces will gradually get filled);radar range indication, asteroid 'info' panel to give size & 'composition' of asteroid, a 'lock and track' system, fuel/shield/energy indicators etc etc.

The playable demo starts off with a single 'size 4' rock to blast at, when that has been obliterated it pops up another 'size 5' one for the player to go at and just keeps doing that over and over. Currently I could have up to 5 'size 5' asteroids of different 'types' on screen at once. As you shoot them the asteroids break up randomly into smaller sizes until the smallest size which simply hides. There are 29 asteroids of each 'type' so that is the maximum number of on screen fragments for each type, with 5 types in theory you could have 29*5 fragments to shoot at (all of which would be travelling in different directions at different speeds!), not sure how GG would deal with that but that should be plenty to shoot at.

I have another 10 'types' sitting in the wings but as I add each one the loading times get longer and longer even though adding a type is really just adding one more pretty low res texture, all the 'types' share the same 29 basic meshes but thats GG for you.

Enough drivel for now, need to go earn some beer tokens.

Wow! This looks really good!

I love a good space shooter. Gonna have to put my x-wing fighter helmet on for this!

You should upload your file to Mediafire.

Latest version here, looks different in the latest version of GG though, oh and don't invoke the games menu whilst playing (i.e. don't hit escape) as the mouse gets turned off, I'll have to look back at my moonlander demo to see how I fixed that particular problem before.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/xfjvpd2s67viuo0/asteroids.7z

Wow that's going to be a lot of work. But fun. Your scripts are truly amazing! I always look you up on here. People like you and Smallg are the reason why I haven't gave up on g.g. I'm into sci fi myself. You made my ufo's fly! You really made my game come alive with the helicopter etc. scripts! Thank you!
I'll be coming back to see your progress. I Can't wait to see what you come up with.

Any feedback on the playing side of this btw, have I got the controls about right? I've got so used to it now I can't really get a feel for how easy/hard it is to fly the darn thing (even though in reality it isn't going anywhere, all smoke and mirrors, just don't look behind that curtain).

It feels great. Fly's and shoots just fine. I keep losing the asteroids. But, that's just me sucking at it. Ha ha One more thing? What are you going to do with the moon lander game you started? I loved the way you made that moon lander fly. That would be a big sell in the store. Or even just sell the scripts(to me cough) to use with other ships and stuff. People would buy them up. I'm looking to make a ship fly in my game for a level I been working on. I can't wait for Lee to add flight. Knowing how busy he's been lately. That's going to be a long wait.

All my movement scripts are based on the same principles, i.e. quaternion lib + the utils lib and can easily be replicated by anyone.

The reason I've dropped the moonlander demo is that Lee 'fixed' 3rd person (supposedly) so now my astronaut runs around holding an invisible gun and jumps over imaginary fences and I don't know how to fix it!

Added to that the original large maps I created no longer load properly and even when they do the textures are all rendering wrong, lighting looks rubbish etc etc.

Probably all fixable but I'll wait until the DX11 official release before I bother with it.

Finally, Lee is never going to 'add flight' or 'add vehicles', at least not until he adds access to the physics engine and a few other things that are missing.

All my demos fake it, in reality that is what all games are doing I suppose, as long as you can make the player think they are driving around then all is good. Working out how to make it look realistic is the tricky part.


Btw, press Shift+E to change the scale on the radar, the radar is the main way of figuring out where the asteroids are wrt to the ship.

Man! Lee has to fix that stuff as soon as it rear its ugly head! I know what you mean, a few of my ai are running around with no weapons! And there are other bugs to. I love your moon lander game. I sure hope Lee fixes his stuff soon. So you can finish working on it? I'll have to try shift+E then. Thanks for letting us play your game!

This looks incredible