Once again, I’ve made a fair amount of progress since the last update. I’ve added some new features and functionality, and made some changes and overhauls to existing features. First, a screenshot.
I’ll start with the obvious visible changes. First, I’ve gone into Maya and made some basic 3D models for some of the ships. Specifically, the Flagship, the Assault Frigate, and the Escort Frigate (lightly armed and armored, but armed with rapid-fire low-power beams; it’s a glass cannon that’s perfect for intercepting torpedoes). I’ve brought these into Unity, and it feels great to see some actual models even if they’re only placeholders. It also means I can sidestep any weirdness that came from me scaling the boxes to make different units; now every unit is scaled 1x1x1.
I’ve also added bars for health and shields on both friendly and enemy units; now you can see just how much damage a ship is taking.
I’ve also changed the way highlighting selected units works. Before I used a free outline shader asset from the asset store, but this had an issue: the outline showed above the health bars. I decided I should instead figure out a solution that I completely understand myself; if this project is going to be a learning experience for me, I should try and do as much on my own as possible. This meant going back to the drawing board. I tried a few ideas, including Unity’s GUI box drawing system, but then I realized there was a very simple solution I’d forgotten: putting a circle around each unit within the worldspace, and then enabling or disabling it to show if a unit was selected or not. It’s a good solution for now, but it isn’t perfect. For instance, I can see it being less visible when the camera’s at a different angle. One idea might be to have the selection circles rotate to face the camera, but this is an idea to play around with later, particularly when I’ve started work on camera controls.
On the less obvious side, I’ve reworked the internal structuring of the various ships. Now every ship uses a box collider for things like movement, while having the models as children. This will make swapping out models later much easier. I’ve also given each ship an empty parent object that contains the ship itself and the health bars, in order to make sure that the health bars and ships are properly connected.
I’ve also started laying the foundation for an FTL jump system, where every ship has a jump countdown timer. If the ship has been ordered to jump, and the timer is at or below zero, the ship will disappear. My overall plan is for the ships to be disabled, then get re-enabled by the game manager after all surviving ships in the fleet have jumped.
My next priorities will likely be continuing work on the jump system, the enemy commander and enemy ship behaviors, and giving player ships the ability to fire torpedoes.
Evan Parry 