Beyond Beyaan - Master of Orion/X-Com rip-off

[Zeraan]

Alright, I'm starting on a new project, since the Asteroids of Beyaan is basically done for now (til someone help me with sounds). This is called "Beyond Beyaan", a 4x turn-based strategy game where you colonize and conquer the galaxy.

The MoO ripoff is obvious from that, but how does X-Com tie in this game? That's actually how I'm going to do my ground combat, X-Com Ufo Defense-style

This is my first major game that will require quite a bit of effort to do, and may not be finished in two months like my asteroids one

The reason why I'm doing this is that I love MoO, but some quirks about it I dislike. I also like MoO 3 macro-management approach, but I think it was overly done (you can hit turn and have your empire do things automatically). I liked MoO 2's style of space combat, but when you have 100's of ships, it get tedious. So what I'm doing is take the best elements from each game and incorporate it into Beyond Beyaan.

Here's my overview of how the game will run:
Each star can have 0 - 6 planets. Each planet is managed by sliders (aka MoO 1) in those fields: Agriculture, Mining, Industry, Commerce, Research, and Environment (Pollution management). Notice no construction field? All of the industry points from all planets in a star system will contribute to the star system's construction efforts. Like in MoO 1, each star only creates one design. If no design is being built, all the points are then passed down to empire construction efforts. Stargate between two systems for example, or "Death Star" like star wars. You honestly think one planet, or even one system can create an entire artifical moon?

Space battles will be a hybrid of MoO 1 and 2. You can stack ships of the same design, but you don't have to stack all of them on one group, you can create 2 or more "squadrons" of stacked ships. That way it'll avoid the problem in MoO 2 where you have 100's of ships in combat, and keeping the battles simple yet fun. Ground combat troops are created when you create transport ships. Let me explain it this way: You enter the ship design screen, and you design transport ship. Instead of normal weaponry, you put "Tank - Laser" in a slot, "Marine - Plasma" in next slot, and so forth. So when you create the transport, those armies are automatically created, and you will see all of them (if they survive the drop off) on ground in ground combat.

So that's a concise sum of this game. What do you think of the ideas?

I suck at art, so if you want to contribute to this game, I'd appreciate it!

[Zeraan]

Update on my progress!

I've created the galaxy generator code, at least for "Random" type of galaxies where stars are just placed randomly aka MoO 1. There will be other galaxy shapes you can select, but for now, Random will do. I also created the DrawGalaxy code. It will take in your screen resolution, your camera position, and how zoomed out you are, then draws all the stars that are visible. They also scale correctly, so you can zoom out or in to see more or less stars. It is also resolution independent, so if you resize your window, it will still render correctly as if you didn't resize.

Here's a screenshot of the galaxy zoomed out quite a bit. Note, this is 250 stars, and not all are visible here. The right side is intentionally left blank for user interface stuff.

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... hot1-2.jpg

The explorations will be similar to MoO 1/2 where you are limited in distance you can travel, but it will also have starlanes. The reason behind starlanes is that it enables you to create strategic chokeholds (unlike MoO 1/2) and makes it easier for me to do AI.

[Zeraan]

After figuring out how to do lines in RenderTarget, and figuring out how to do starlanes (I used Voronoi Diagram algorithm), I was able to link all the stars together! I also did some research in random name generator, and here's the result!

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... hot5-1.jpg

Next thing on agenda: Add planets to each star, along with more detailed information about the star itself. Anyone here likes Master of Orion type of games?

[Zeraan]

I'm not sure if I'm spamming or not with every update. If you prefer me to post less that covers more changes, I can do that. Anyway, back on topic. This is a kinda significant update from the last one.

Star selection is now enabled. You can click on any star, and the information (if the star is explored) will show up on top right section.

I've also tweaked the display so it only displays stars that you have explored (for now, it's randomly set to have one star explored), and the starlanes connected to the explored stars.

Planets are also generated, and each star can have up to 6 planets. I stole the list of different planets from Master of Orion 1 and 2, with some changes. Arid is now Badland (since Arid is basically Desert), Inferno is now Volcanic, and Minimal is now Arctic. Asteroids, Gas Giants, and None are uninhabitable, but that can change when you have the technology to change gas giants and asteroids into planets, and create artifical planets (think Death Star, but for domestic purposes)

Here's the screenshot of the progress so far: http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... hot6-1.jpg

[Zeraan]

I recently started a new job as a full-time developer. So my hobby game development will suffer. But I'm still committed to this since I want to play this when it's done

These are some of the cool stuff I want to implement:

Ability to form your own senate (Think Axis vs Allies) with at least two other allied empires.

Ability to destroy planets during combat, not "Post Battle Actions" (Think Star Wars 4, with rebels trying to destroy death star before it destroys Yavin 4)

Technologies won't be static, as in that once researched, it's done, with only miniaturization. Each technology will be able to be re-researched to make a better version. However there will be diminishing returns (more research required per level to achieve the same amount of improvements) and eventually you'd want to research in better fields. For example, Laser Cannon does 1-4 damage and have range of 1. Another research improves this to 2-8 damage with range of 2, and so forth. But then you can research plasma cannon that does 10 - 20 damage. You make the decision in what you want to research.

Ground combat will have an important role in this. There will be an entire technology tree devoted to groung technologies (weapons, armor, mechanical support like tanks and artillery, buildings for defense, etc). I want to make it so you don't simply pick poor ground combat perks for free points to spend on other fields, you have to actually consider them. During space combat, if transport ships manage to get to your planet and drop their troops, there will be ground combat regardless if you destroyed their fleet. They can capture the planet right under your nose even with your fleet around the planet.

I don't like how space combat have to be separate from other events in MoO 1/2/3. Why can't I land troops during combat? Why can't I just vaporize the planet then retreat?

As for the development process itself, I used to store the starlane connections within the star classes themselves. I decided to change this and make each starlane a class in itself so I can add other effects later if desired (technologies that enhance the starlane for example). In process of doing so, I broke the game. I'm working on fixing that, then when that's fixed, I will add ship travel and exploration and "end of turn" button

That's all for today!

[Zeraan]

Terrible news!

I ordered new computer parts for my computer, and replaced basically everything except for hard drive and the case. In process, I unknowingly swapped the positions of my two hard drives (C become D, and D become C), and I formatted my "system" drive which was actually my "data" drive, and I lost my source files for both Beyond Beyaan and Asteroids Of Beyaan.

I tried to recover them (it was only a quick format) but about 2/3 of my files from Beyond Beyaan was overwritten. Asteroids of Beyaan is gone, fortuanely I have an bit older source files on my laptop.

This is going to set me back, since those 2/3 was the core files, the other 1/3 was the random name generator, and the UI stuff. I lost the Galaxy generation code and Galaxy drawing code and everything else.

I'll have to start over

[domq]

Ouch. Yet another reason to set up a subversion server with the files stored on a second harddrive....

[Zeraan]

Good news! After I decided to stop working on Journeyman (reason is given in other thread), I looked at the files that I was able to salvage from the hard drive after doing a quick format. I found that I were able to salvage some code from this game. So I decided to finally look through them, and to my astonishment, all the critical code (galaxy creation, UI, star systems, rendering code, etc) was salvaged! The main form that stores and calls those classes are overwritten, as well as the empires.cs, but that file is basically just a way to store color and id number of an empire, nothing important.

So I created a new project, put those files in it, and whipped up a quick main form that handles those classes, and this is the result:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... hot7-1.jpg

We're back in business! You may notice that there's no lines connecting stars, I decided that starlanes will make this game a bit too complicated, so I took them out. It'll be like the old MoO. I need to reimplement empires (a simple matter), then I'm back at exactly where I was, fleets.

[Zeraan]

I've been pondering on ship movement in galaxy screen. I have to admit that it got me a bit stumped. Should I do it the same as MoO 1/2 in that you send ships off directly to another star system? If so, how do I correctly calculate the distance between stars and the time required to travel? If I leave from left side of a star (like in MoO 1), it would increase the distance slightly. How do I handle clicking on ships in galaxy screen? go through every ship icon and see if it's under the mouse?

Then one night as I was thinking about how to draw ships with different owners in the same star system it hit me! (MoO 1 puts them in a "list", vertical list of ship icons with different colors, I couldn't find a good screenshot, the best one I could find is this one: http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... ut-292.jpg) Since I was thinking of arranging them in a grid like layout (4 ships down, then a new column if necessary), why not make the entire galaxy a "grid" and each fleet occupies one grid cell? It'd solve quite a few issues, make mouse selections easier, and make intercepting other fleets in space possible!

It's not really different from Master of Orion's concept of travel, you can still travel directly to other stars. But you can also choose to travel to dead space and park there, ready for any invading fleets. I've made several decisions about how this will be done:

Exploring stars require you to be on a grid cell adjacent to the star you want to explore.
Combat occurs if you and the opposing fleet are adjacent in grid cell (diagonally or sharing a border), or if both are touching the same star.
Fleets can't go directly through stars, they'll have to go around to avoid the gravity pull. But combat can occur in the star system if you invade, but in galaxy view they will stay outside of star for simplicity.
If you have two stars that's out of range of each other with your current fuel range, and both are owned by you, you can't go directly through the area where there's no fuel range, you'll have to go around.

In my opinion, I think this will actually enhance the gameplay, rather than restricting it. It adds elements of strategy and exploration not present in MoO series.

I've implemented grid and fuel range, although no fleets or movements yet. This is what you will see when you have a fleet selected for movement:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... hot9-1.jpg

What do you guys think of this idea?

Next on agenda, adding fleets themselves (will start with 2 scout ships and a colony ship) and fleet movement.

[Zeraan]

I found a problem. The more zoomed out I am, the slower the game runs (I'm running a quadcore with 4 gig of memory!) I realized that I'm doing the grid stuff in the worst possible way:

Calculating whether or not a grid cell is within fuel range of any owned planet for EVERY grid cell within view for EVERY refresh.

I've optimized it a bit so it stores the last calculations, and recalculates only if the camera moves or changes zoom. Next is to make a function that makes circles around owned planets and fill in the grid cells, instead of analyzing every grid cell (160x160 = 25,600 grid cells if I zoom out all the way with 100 star system)

I need to remind myself often that this is a turn-based game, and I don't have to re-calculate everything with every monitor refresh. Crunching the numbers:

doing a per-grid cell basis:
100 stars checks + 2 owned systems * approximately 360 cycles worth of instructions for each owned system = 820 cycles
820 cycles per grid cell * 25,600 grid cells = 20,992,000 cycles worth! That's 21 megahertz required to process ONE frame! No wonder it was lagging so bad!

Now if I do a function that fills in circles, it'd be:

100 star checks for owned planets
2 owned systems * maybe 500 to 1000 cycles for each owned planet filling in circles = 1,100 to 2,100 cycles, a massive improvement! A 2 khz cpu can process that in the same amount of time a 21 Mhz will take to achieve the same result!

I'll have to do some research in circle drawing and filling to see the algorithm behind it, then implement it. it will significantly boost the game speed in processing those grid cells!

Taking it a little further, I could store ALL the grid cells in the galaxy, not just the visible area. So I'd have to refresh ONLY if I lose or gain a planet. That means if I have 100 stars, it'd be 40x40 "star grid" which means 160x160 grid cells = 25,600 grid cells, each is just a boolean value to see if it's within range or not.

Now if we have 6 empires in this game, that's 6 boolean values for each grid cell, so 6 * 25,600 = 153,600, and usually one byte represents one boolean value, so that's about 153 kb of memory, not too bad then.

This started out as a complain about the lag in my game, but evolved into an idea for highly efficient method of doing this! I'm posting this so when I go to bed and take this weekend off, I won't forget my ideas!

[ShadowDust702]

looks pretty decent

[Zeraan]

The change to storing fuel ranges for the entire galaxy is done, and I fill in the data using an algorithm to draw circles in a paint program. The result is incredible increase in speed! This screenshot is of a galaxy with 1,000 stars. I've randomly selected 5 stars to be owned by me, and with fuel range of 28 or something. It ran smoothly! Much much much better than before. With my old method, it'd eat my computer for breakfast!

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... ot10-1.jpg

Next on agenda, fleet movement and pathfinding and the "Turn" button!

[Zeraan]

A bit of an update! Fleets are somewhat implemented now. I've set up a starting fleet for each empire, and implemented drawing of fleets in galaxy screen. You can see a couple of screenshots of this in action:

Zoomed out:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... ot11-1.jpg

Zoomed in:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot12.jpg

Right now, those fleets don't actually have any ships. I plan on implementing pathfinding, "end of turn", and movement during end of turn phase, then implement exploration of stars with those empty fleets, as they're actually tangible than a list of ships that you won't actually see in battle any time soon.

As I worked on the galaxy stuff, I realized that there's a few features that's not present in any of the MoO series. Those are:

1. The ability to select a starting star system. If you want to do a 2v2 for example, I think it'd be nice to have the option to either have your home star system set randomly, or being able to pick a spot that's near your ally.

2. Star density options. By this I mean how close the star systems are to each other. Right now I'm using a "factor" of 4 in my algorithm. WHat I do is take a square root of the total number of stars, then multiply it by that factor, and I got a 40x40 possible spots for a 100 stars game. If I increase this factor (say, to 10), then the stars can be really far apart, each star are randomly placed, but with a rule that they have to be a minimum of 2 spots away from the nearest star. This could make fuel technology really important, and incorporate the concept of establishing outposts to increase fuel range.

3. Individual difficulty setting for each AI player. In all of the MoO series, there's only one difficulty setting, and it applies to everybody. In Beyond Beyaan, you will be able to pick the difficulty setting for each AI player, as well as their race (possibly even being able to customize their perks and weaknesses?). You can also pick random for that element of surprise

4. Spying as an investment, not random luck. I think that spying should be considered as an investment. The more you put in, the more payoff it will be. The way I'm thinking, there will be "levels" of infiltration, with the lowest as being merely "Inside the empire", and the highest in "Trusted Elite Circles" (think of a spy within White House for example). If you get caught spying, you drop down a level. Counter-spying investment will counter their investment in spying. So if your investments outweight theirs, it will be very hard for them to advance a level.

I'm planning on incorporating those features, I feel that this will make for increased replayability of this game. You can tweak the galaxy to be more dense, making fuel range less important, or to be more sparse, making fuel important. You can set up locations for epic showdown with your friends, or randomly select a position and go from there. You can customize the AI's options. Spying will be fun, instead of a major pain in the butt like in Moo 2 and 3 (I hated how their spy system is set up). I've loved the spying system of MoO 1, but feel that it can be improved on.

What do you think of those features? Would those improve the game's replayability? Make it more fun?

[ShadowDust702]

I'm not much of a turn based fan myself lol, but looks good. I could have some fun with that, I'm keen for a try

[Zeraan]

I've implemented fleet selecting with mouse. While implementing this, I got an idea. We could use left click for selecting stuff, and right click for setting destination for fleets. While I was thinking about this, why not right click set rally points for ships as they are constructed from systems?

This way, instead of having to click on "relocation" then setting a location, it's accomplished in one action! I'm also thinking of revamping the UI stuff so it's easier to use.

I've also implemented A* algorithm for pathfinding, but I still need to actually assign the calculated path to the fleet, and displaying it on galaxy screen. Then when that's done, I will implement end of turn and fleet speed, and star exploration.

Sorry I was busy the last few days, was busy with my family and stuff. Hopefully by end of May, I'll have the basic gameplay going (exploration, colonization, population growth, and MAYBE ship construction and advanced fleet management)

I'm not posting a screenshot because there's not really anything significant. The fleet selection is just a highlight of the fleet selected.

[Zeraan]

I tested the A* algorithm, and I was doing something wrong, so I fixed it. The pathfinding is working correctly now. I've made it so that the path is visible when you select the fleet. Fuel Range is visible only when you have one of your fleets selected. If you have another empire's fleet selected, no fuel range.

Here's a screenshot of the pathfinding in action. See how fuel range is critical to fleet movement?

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot13.jpg

No more traversing directly between two owned stars if they're out of fuel range of each other. I think this will add some fun strategy elements to the game!

Next to do: "End Turn" processing!

[ShadowDust702]

ooo, nice I'm actually doing path finding in my project right now. Gosh it's a challenge lol, mine isn't tile based so i can't really implement A*

[Zeraan]

Sorry about the lack of updates. When I started to implement end of turn stuff, I realized that the galaxy class is doing much more than it should, and if I'm to implement end of turn, I'd have to add to galaxy class to handle that. I originally planned galaxy class to store the systems, fleets, fuel ranges, galaxy generation, and which system or fleet is selected. But what it actually did (including those previously stated) was handle drawing, camera movement, camera stuff, and some other code that it shouldn't be handling.

So if I want to continue development of this game without "coding myself in corner" I'd have to refactor my code and remove those from galaxy that it shouldn't be handling. This kinda caused me to lose some steam, along with being busy at work and a weekend with my in-laws.

So yesterday I've finally started to refactor my code, and now the galaxy class isn't doing stuff it's not supposed to do, and making my code much easier to maintain. I also added an event if the window is resized, it'd cause the game to update its drawing region and scale the stars appropriately. So if you have a widescreen, it wouldn't stretch the stars.

Now, to finally implement the end of turn... After that I think I'm going to set up networking code!

[Zeraan]

I've also posted in the atari forums about this game. This thread will be more for updates on development progress, while the other thread will be more for gameplay mechanics and discussion.

Here's the thread:
http://forums.atari.com/showthread.php?t=4368

[Zeraan]

Finally I'm done refactoring my code (there were a couple of changes I had to make), and it's so much easier to add in new stuff now! It was worth it!

I've got end of processing code working now! Fleets now move at their maximum speed at end of turn, although I need to fix the camera so it's zoomed at the right distance to view the whole galaxy. The end of turn looks similar to MoO 1, in that it views the entire galaxy, and shows all fleets visible to you moving. If one fleet have a max speed of 3, and another at 7, you will see the ship with speed of 3 stop and the ship with speed of 7 continue moving, like MoO 1. Yeah I know it's cheesy, but that's the way I like it

Once I add star system detection for when a fleet is next to a star, the game will have it's first of 4x elements, eXploration! I've decided to put networking on hold until I've implemented colonizing of planets, building ships/fleets, and being able to view individual ships in a selected fleet. The reason is that I want an actual somewhat playable version, not just a chat application. Speaking of playable version, I guess I'll need to add main menu and options and stuff like that... Bleh, UI isn't my favorite thing, and yet this game will have tons of them!

I've found a networking library, Lidgren Network Library (http://code.google.com/p/lidgren-network-gen3/), that handles the low-level networking stuff. This will help smooth out the multiplayer development when I get to it.

[Zeraan]

Yay, exploration is in! When your fleet is next to a star, it will explore that star system now, even if you're just passing by. The only requirement is that you must be directly adjacent to the system.

Here's a screenshot. Well it don't show the exploration in action, but you can see that the fleet have moved, and that it've explored two systems

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot15.jpg

[Zeraan]

I'm currently in process of implementing fleet UI in galaxy screen. Here's a preview of what it looks like:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot16.jpg

The top part is for when multiple fleets are in the same grid cell. It will list each fleet by their empire's name, for example:

"Zeraan's Empire Fleet - Idling"
"Evil Computer Fleet - Traveling"

Idling is when a fleet don't have any movement orders. The bottom part of the fleet UI are for individual ship types in the fleet. It will be similar to Master of Orion's ship UI. You can slide a slider to determine the amount of ships you want to split.

You can have more than 6 ship types in one fleet, as indicated by the up/down arrows.

When this part is done, I'd say that the galaxy part of the game will be ALMOST done, just need colonizing and "You've explored a new star system" message. Maybe a sitrep informing you of ships constructed, and other events that happened? That would be for later though.

After this part and colonizing are done, I think I'm going to do battles next!

[Zeraan]

I've made several changes in how the game do fleets internally. Previously when you select a fleet, it'd loop through all the fleets and return the first hit on a fleet that occupies the location. This won't work if I want to view all the fleets at that location. This is the same problem that Master of Orion 1 suffered. If you send at least two fleets to different destinations from the same location, you can only select the topmost outgoing fleet. It now returns a list of all fleets in that location, regardless if it's yours or not, and lists them on the fleet list. Here's a couple of screenshots showing the changes in action:

My selected fleet:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot17.jpg

A computer's fleet:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot18.jpg

I also added Empire Name so it will show the owner of the fleet. I will add text coloring soon to match the fleet with their empire color.

I feel that the more I work on this, the bigger I realize the work required in making this game is. Now I need to add ship types and have them work in the UI as well, then colonization, then I'd relucantly say that this game is semi-playable...

[Zeraan]

I've made some modifications to how fleet path selection works. Instead of it showing the path after you've clicked on a spot, it will show you the "tentative" path (and eventually the turns required to arrive there). When you right click, it will "confirm" the tentative, making it the actual path. This is better than clicking on a spot, then moving your mouse way over there to click "Accept" button to accept the path.

I've also started some work on having ships within fleet. You can see that the topmost fleet is selected, and it consists of a colony ship. Right now, they don't have any designs, just "Ship Name" and "HasColonyPod" variables.

Here's the screenshot
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot19.jpg

Light green path is the "tentative" path that is highlighted by your mouse, dark green is the path that it will actually travel. Light green turns into dark green when you right click.

Fleet UI still don't have mouse working, but that'll be fixed this week hopefully. I'm also making some minor changes to the UI and galaxy view so it'll all look nicer.

[Zeraan]

I've been working a lot on the UI stuff. I'm sick of the crappy art, so I decided to take the time to draw some decent art. I've also modified the grid cells so they don't look like a grid. The plan is to make the fuel range semi-transparent. Exploring new systems now have end of turn notifications that you've explored a new system. It also detects if you have a colony ship next to an inhabitable planet. I need to add prompt and planet selection, then colonization will be working.

I think after colonization and whatever bugs I run into, I'll start work on construction and planet growth so you can create more colony ships and spread around the map.

Here's a couple of screenshots:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot21.jpg

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b102/ ... shot22.jpg

Would you guys be interested in trying this when colonizing systems is implemented? That's basically all you'll be able to do (aside from exploring).