Monday 30 September 2013

I've been working a bit on the GUI preview details, this will show details about the grid your mouse is hovering over while you have a ship selected. It will show details such as the default order if you right click, how much cap you should have once you arrive if moving, what damage you can deal and chance to hit percent of each weapon, this takes into account cap once you arrive and stats of your ships and the hostile ones as shown in the early GUI below:


The other current progress has been on ship design, I've decided to go full module layout\design with an internal grid. Below is the start of it which mainly has been getting preview windows working that render available hulls and rotate when mouse over. Grid positioning has been setup too which is loaded from an image to represent available grids. I will add background textures to make it a little more like a control window but it isn't going to take up fullscreen because I really want all GUI screens to still allow access to the main window (albeit a smaller space on the side or something) incase you want to check something in game when you're deciding on ship design options.




The grid will be rendered with a textured model of the ship internals, plus sides to tie it in better (looks like the ingame ship with the roof off). Probably won't render green but this is just for testing at the moment, I'll also have fixed grid positions for certain ship types to represent specialized ships that need to be designed around their specialization. For example colony ships need a colony ship hull because much of the systems are integrated into the hull. From a gameplay point of view this is mainly so I don't have to penalize or add some other stats to stop players using colony ships for combat because they have more internal space (easier to balance from my point of view).

This is just the current plans for modular design and specialized equipment and will be optional for user created mods if desired.

As always would be glad to hear any feedback or questions you have.

Thanks,