Void Runner - Bringing Construct to its knees...

The next build I release publically is going to have objects on the planets, varying planet sizes, alien life, weaponry, and very rarely ruins with alien artifacts in them, which may be sold at space stations that will spawn in deep space for money. The money will be worthless at the time of that release, but at least the whole thing will have a "point".

I estimate all of that will be a few weeks from now. Maybe less. I have a vacation coming up this week but you know...Quakecon.

EDIT: Ok, perhaps a bit sooner than that...

It's funny. I didn't tell my artist what I added, I just told him it was a surprise update and to go check out the planets. Well the aliens spawn out of the damn trees, and he's been working in a barren universe for a while, so he pretty much wet his pants when the first one attacked him.

"Hey what's that red bar on the UI?" "I dunno must be a bug or something."

you must finish this game.. seriously, or else i will kill you

It's like Spore and Alien Breed mixed together - can't go wrong

Man, kudos both for you and your artist.

I was working on a game somewhat similar to this back in my Megazeux days. You played as a space pirate, and you went from planet to planet fighting enemies and stealing treasure. Treasure would allow you to purchase upgrades for your ship and weapons and so forth. I got a good deal of work done on it, but I admit, it wasn't nearly as random or as infinite as this thing here.

May I suggest a random name generator, to generate star system and/or planet names? I'm not entirely sure about how you could implement this idea, but you could probably think of something easily enough. (Unless of course you've already implemented something like that, and I just can't tell)

Anyway, keep up the good work.

May I suggest a random name generator, to generate star system and/or planet names?

Check the last link I posted, up in the top left you'll see I'm on planet "Apyor 6", which I've changed to roman numerals "Apyor VI". Now when you click planets, the ship computer (text to speech object), will say the name of the planet, and a few details about it, like population, moons, type, size, etc.

But my big project right now is coming up with this system to randomly generate ship interiors. It will be used both for the player ship (you should be able to walk around your ship as you fly it), and when boarding enemy ships, or derelict vessels:

<img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/2fc3b7b4-616f-45af-8011-9b8e4e750509/2010-08-09_0045.png"> <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/c5d125ff-54f6-4d8c-a24a-404a03ad7a8e/2010-08-09_0046.png">

I made branches symmetrical so they don't have that "deflated testicle" look anymore. I've already changed this to generate an actual tilemap, with walls and stuff. I'll probably have a workable version up tonight and post a screenshot.

The more I think about the system I've used, the more excited I get about it. I am fairly sure I could modify it to generate spacestation interiors and buildings and dungeons on planets!

Oh my god!!!! This is seriously my dream game. I really hope you finish it....I love space games. Just don't make it too random and have cool missions and I'll be the first to buy it.

As promised, a couple of ships from the current iteration of my ship generator, none touched by hand: Ship Number One, Ship Number Two, and my personal favorite, Ship Number Three (I swear. I didn't touch it!):

<img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/d36e3a9a-9997-4bca-ba04-749e9e69c3a7/2010-08-10_0142.png">

Oh lord, this is awesome.

Made a little video showing progress, a little bit about where we're going with it, etc. I used my best pilot voice. "Attention passengers, we will be experiencing mild turbulence for the next five minutes or so. Please remain seated."

I'm working on something similar. How have you dealt with wrapping the ship seamlessly? (surely you can't just use unbounded scrolling and allow the player to go to huge x/y coords. Won't this use lots of memory and make calculations less reliable etc.)

cheers

Might I ask how the layouts work in a project like this? I've always wanted to limit it to as few as possible, and with this being generated the way it is, I'm curious if it uses a few or maybe just one?

We are currently using one layout for space, one layout for planet surfaces, one layout for interior generation, and a main menu layout.

EDIT: I needed a break with all the ship stuff. I made some progress on it today, but I decided to implement weather. Rain, Snow, and Ash Storms are implemented and persistent. Some planets are more prone to storms than others. Tomorrow I'll plow ahead on the ship stuff a bit more and implement moons around planets and space stations in deep space sectors.

Oh and I also added a main menu that lets you spawn where you want in any universe you want: http://screencast.com/t/MzYwMTMyOGU

Till next time gents.

We're still alive. Making good progress. The list of changes is huge. Weather, detail objects, main menu, ship interiors, ship internal systems (power, navigation, etc), space stations with a nifty docking animation, etc... The next release won't be coming until ship internals are complete, inventory is added, and all interiors are at least generated. (Caves, Buildings on planets, and space stations.) Here's some pictures.

Inside the ship...

On a lava world...

On a jungle planet...

Hit a snag doing the power subsystems in the ship - you can see the tile based solution we were trying before in the last screencap of the ship interior. I think I've found a good solution now. Here's a quick screencap of the testbed application for our new freeform power system:

<img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/Arsonide/folders/Jing/media/89f0c9d3-9b3e-4e49-9e20-e91aa0f8d5dd/2010-08-20_0555.png">

Wires were created at runtime, and are draggable. Movie Time!