WIP: SpringCombat

[krasse]

I have started to work with my physics-based space combat game again.







Blog post

Here are some videos (most recent first):

Cool battle
Ship configuration and battle
Ship hull textures
Ramming test
Procedural ship hull tester

Planned features:
* Evolve you own ship (and friendly bot) by buying new segments, weapons etc.
* Generative/reactive music
* Procedural levels and ships

It is currently rendered using Java2D. My plan is to keep the renderer/sound/music separate so I can simply make LWJGL, GWT (webGL and pure canvas), Android variants as well. I will however make the first game an Applet/Java application with Java2D.

[Eli Delventhal]

Looks nifty! Hard to tell exactly what is going on but that youtube reminds me a lot of what gish prototypes looked like (which is a good thing).

[krasse]

Looks nifty! Hard to tell exactly what is going on but that youtube reminds me a lot of what gish prototypes looked like (which is a good thing).

Thanks! If this week's work turns out like planned, I'll have a much better video soon

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[krasse]

Here is a new video with some added visual effects and player control:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO2HHm0B524

[Eli Delventhal]

Now the real question is: how are you going to draw all that so it doesn't look crappy? :-)

[krasse]

Now the real question is: how are you going to draw all that so it doesn't look crappy? :-)

The Java2D renderer will probably always look crappy with its flat shaded, vector graphics stuff . It might look a bit better when I add backgrounds and make the obstacles more visually varied.
For the OpenGL renderer (LWJGL or WebGL), the plan is to use textures with normal maps for everything which will spice it up. I have a lot of particle effects/animations as well that I want to use for explosions, smoke etc.

Do you have any anti-crap hints for me when it comes to Java2D (and JS canvas) rendering?

[Eli Delventhal]

Now the real question is: how are you going to draw all that so it doesn't look crappy? :-)

The Java2D renderer will probably always look crappy with its flat shaded, vector graphics stuff . It might look a bit better when I add backgrounds and make the obstacles more visually varied.
For the OpenGL renderer (LWJGL or WebGL), the plan is to use textures with normal maps for everything which will spice it up. I have a lot of particle effects/animations as well that I want to use for explosions, smoke etc.

Do you have any anti-crap hints for me when it comes to Java2D (and JS canvas) rendering?

There isn't much you can do with Java2D, I'm afraid. You can make gradient fills perhaps, and anti-alias lines, but textures are mostly out of the question as far as I know.

[ra4king]

You can have an image wrapped around a shape.
Look into http://ra4king.is-a-geek.net/javadocs/java/awt/TexturePaint.html

It's not much, but it's the closest thing there is to textures.

[CommanderKeith]

There isn't much you can do with Java2D, I'm afraid. You can make gradient fills perhaps, and anti-alias lines, but textures are mostly out of the question as far as I know.

If by textures you mean images, Java2D is actually quite good. It can paint heaps of transformed images pretty quickly, so long as java2D lets the video card hardware accelerate, which it doesn't for many intel cards

There's radial and linear gradient paints and they're also fast with hardware accel.

A tip: One problem with java2D is that you can't do soft-clipping or anti-aliasing of images, so if you paint a rotated image it will always have jaggies on the edges. One way to make it look better is to draw a rectangle around the edge of the image in feint grey or some other translucent color to make it look less jaggy.

[zammbi]

One problem with java2D is that you can't do soft-clipping or anti-aliasing of images, so if you paint a rotated image it will always have jaggies on the edges.

Well can do this but will be a performance hit of course.
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/campbell/archive/2007/03/java_2d_tricker.html

This is good back reading on scaling images:
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/04/03/perils-of-image-getscaledinstance.html

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[krasse]

Thanks for all the info!

I remember now that I tried some texture paint a couple of years ago but it was extremely slow on my machine so I forgot about it

[ra4king]

Well that was a couple years ago. Computers are now much more powerful. The demo on those websites ran instantly on my relatively crappy laptop.

[Eli Delventhal]

Nice, I didn't know you could do all that in Java2D. Cool.

[krasse]

Added a video with some sound effects, procedural level generation, automatic path planning graph and a not so smart bot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzosXl-VJkQ

The sound effects are played with the Gervill Midi player with some key-based tuning messages for doppler effects (currently not really working well).

[ra4king]

Holy crap how many classes do you have?!?

[krasse]

Holy crap how many classes do you have?!?

Far to many!

[loom_weaver]

I would differentiate the smoke from damage from ejector thrust.  Grey circles for the first and lines for the second.

Upon first glance, I thought I was seeing a top-down of Archie's jalopy as he was driving over to pickup Veronica. 

[krasse]

I would differentiate the smoke from damage from ejector thrust.  Grey circles for the first and lines for the second.

Upon first glance, I thought I was seeing a top-down of Archie's jalopy as he was driving over to pickup Veronica. 

Damage from ejector thrust? I had to google two times since I didn't know what Archie's jalopy was either

OpenGL will solve all the visual stuff for me eventually. In my vision I have a lot of nice looking cool explosions, weapons, backgrounds etc. that will hide the fact that it is extremely stupid to make a mass-spring based shmup

[loom_weaver]

Heh, minus points to me for vague cultural references.

What I meant to say (and you figured out by now) is that the grey circle special effects for thrust looks more like billowing smoke and makes me think that the ship is heavily damaged (possibly on fire) and about to fall apart--like Archie's clunker.

[ra4king]

What I meant to say (and you figured out by now) is that the grey circle special effects for thrust looks more like billowing smoke and makes me think that the ship is heavily damaged (possibly on fire) and about to fall apart--like Archie's clunker.

Exactly my first impressions! It took me a while to realize that the grey circles are just special effects when you're moving

[krasse]

Heh, minus points to me for vague cultural references.

What I meant to say (and you figured out by now) is that the grey circle special effects for thrust looks more like billowing smoke and makes me think that the ship is heavily damaged (possibly on fire) and about to fall apart--like Archie's clunker.

I see what you mean . Thanks for pointing that out.

[krasse]

A first go at procedural ship hulls:



Larger image

[Mads]

A first go at procedural ship hulls:



Larger image

Nice! I love games that has procedural elements. It keeps it from getting boring and same-y, if it's done correctly
I think the ones that are only composed of (2 - 3) big ellipses are ugly.. They need more shape than boring ellipses

[krasse]

Nice! I love games that has procedural elements. It keeps it from getting boring and same-y, if it's done correctly
I think the ones that are only composed of (2 - 3) big ellipses are ugly.. They need more shape than boring ellipses

Yes, some are ugly

It is really interesting to see what can be done with different shapes. I want the friendly ships to be recognized by the shape grammar they use, for example more soft shapes or something else.

A future more tricky issue is to transform them to masses and springs while keeping them stable. Tesselation alone isn't enough

[Eli Delventhal]

This is a very interesting project, I like your experimentation with the procedural ships, looks super cool!

[krasse]

This is a very interesting project, I like your experimentation with the procedural ships, looks super cool!

Thanks!

Here are two videos that show some of the procedurally generated ships in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YVDE7Zvns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-h8sPUn3pw

The second one also demonstrates the generative music module.

[ra4king]

Pretty cool!! Did you use the generative and reactive music module thing? I remember seeing a thread a while back where someone showcased this amazing tool to procedurally create music.

[krasse]

Pretty cool!! Did you use the generative and reactive music module thing? I remember seeing a thread a while back where someone showcased this amazing tool to procedurally create music.

I used my own music module, but I have also showcased it on JGO so I could be that someone
Anyways, the following is a demo of the latest music module. It sounds a lot better now, but I am not satisfied yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91YokdJ9jqo

The coolest parts are when the threat and intensity goes up and happyness down

[ra4king]

Oh it was you!
Found it: http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/generative-reactive-music-api-for-games/23674/view.html

Very impressive! I loved playing around with it. I'll most probably use it when I make a game that needs generic background music!

[krasse]

Here is a new video when I use my procedural ship hull tester:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG_XttiqNs0

The idea is that the player can evolve his/her ship and place weapons, rocket engines etc to be able to complete the levels. The interface will not be ugly like this though