Finally I have done the stations, it was a bit more challenging then I though it going to be
But it is done, and works pretty good, though I have experienced a very weird bug. One time everything just mixed up, all the interiors, layers, even the ship and player it was a WTF moment but I could not reproduce it since
It happend when I was docked on a station with the ship, I left the ship on the station, undocked with player, entered in to an other ship, docked on the other station, end just everyting gone crazy, the ship become the player, the base layer become the ship interior the station interiors swapped and finally every layer, every object was shown the screen for a moment and I just pressed EDIT to stop this madness.
But not experienced since and really canāt find the reason how this could happenā¦
Anyway I have updated the project file you can download it from the same link: drive.google.com/folderview?id= ā¦ sp=sharing
and also Iām explaining how things works in the readme file and also tried to do my best in the comments.
Finally the stations are not random in any way because external layouts and layers just make it super difficult to make anything random.
Really, at this point Iām not sure if GD can handle such sandbox game, at least not by using external layouts and layers.
The reason is this, and I also mention this in the readme:
Once the content loaded from the external layout, it always there, even when we hide the layer the objects are there and because Iām loading layers, layouts dynamically you just canāt test it if a layer is visible such easy way as if layer visible ālayer nameā. If you read the readme you going to get the idea why. It is going to be really painful this way, Maybe we should drop the idea of using both exterior and interior, maybe we should focusing only on one or we should find a better way to do it but the only way I can think of is to use scenes and tons of global variables which is not good for performance and maybe even not less painful. Any thoughts on this?
Next Iām going to work on the ship transporter to be able to beam down to surface of stations and later planets, but Iām really not sure if it makes any sense really.
Yes a GIT repo would be better, but Iām not sure if Iām going to have time to maintain it, I just try to give a āpushā to the project this week, but Iām not sure if Iām going to have enough free time after
Ship transporter is ready, project is updated drive.google.com/folderview?id= ā¦ sp=sharing
To use it, the ship that the player is flying, have to be in collision with a station, once it collided the player can use the ship transporter on board of the ship to ābeam downā on to the surface of the station, in this case, the ship temporary going to ābelongsā to the player and player can use the station transporter to ābeam upā straight back to the ship. As of now, player can beam up from station to only recently used ships where the ship transporter is previously used. So, if the player beam down to surface of the station using ship transporter, but on the station decide to fly and undock using an other ship, it causing losing āconnectionā to the previously used ship, and canāt beam up to that ship from station any longer, though in this case, player must be in space anyway flying an other ship and if player going to beam down to station using the ship transporter on board of the ānew shipā, he can beam up from station to that one but not to previous one.
I decided to not add separated option for landing on planet surface, I think it more than enough to populate space and stations with gameplay, but if it going to be necessary we can easily add planet interiors as the feature is already there, we can easily use some stations as planets only have to change the sprite of some station object to look like a planet
If nobody else, Iām going to work on some collisions now and look through the events to delete the unnecessary parts, may few things become messy when I was try to track down some bugs so have to tidy up a bit. After that (or even before that) I think we can start to add some actual gameplay and life
Cool. How about using my splash screen for this project? Seeing how it is supposed to be an ad for GD it would make sense to use it, donāt you think?
Agree But imo, it should be the last thing to add, as If Iām correct, we canāt change the scene in preview only in compiled game and I donāt want to compile the project every time to see what is going on after the splash
But yes, it already in my project folder
ddabrahim: Well, I think you could add the Splash, and, before compile the project, move the Splash scene so it isnāt the first
To check if it works fine now, and donāt have to wait to compile a finished, large project to test only the splashā¦
Darkhog: About the splashā¦ It could be better if you add a āfade-outā effect, not only āfade-inā (I tested it today, with or without fade-out the Splash looks great!), and let the fade reach full opacity (255), not 100, what do you think?
Unfortunately I didnāt have much time to work on the project but in the past one and half day I managed to add some collision between the player, wall tiles and ships on board of stations. Iām not sure if we should use any collision in space, because in space we have enough āspaceā to avoid collision so it absolutely fine if a ship, player can overlap an other ship or station, but will see. I have also added Darkhogās splash screen and made some animation for player object. Now the player object play walk forward, backward, sidle left and right animation on board of stations and ships, In space I still use the same astronaut sprite.
Now it a bit tricky to enter ships on board of stations, because Iām checking collision between ship and player to be able to interact with ships,
I thought about a different way to do it and I think the best way would be to check distance instead of actual collision and also bring the mouse in to the game and some UI menus and options. My idea is that to be able to interact with objects in the game world, the player should be within a certain distance from the object and have to select the object using the mouse to be able to make interaction, and after selecting an object have to select an option from a pop-up menu to choose what to do exactly with the selected object. So, next Iām going to work on this,
I was also thought about the collision in ship interiors to set up the borders of the ship interior to make sure player canāt walk outside the ship interior. Because every ship interior using the same layer at the moment, one way to solve collision in ship interior if every ship interior would be the same size and shape, only looking different but that would be boring and also not appropriate as I would like to have different size ships in the game, so bigger ships would have bigger interior. The other option would be to use different size and shape invisible collider objects to set border of interior and many, many points for each animation of ship interior to move collider objects in the right positions individually for every ship interior, something similar to how door, com and transporter objects is working now. The other option is to make ship interior exactly the same way as stations, so we would use external layouts on it own layer for each interior but that would require lot of layers and layouts and would require many object variables to be able to check which object belongs to which interior/layout/layer exactly and if the player is on the same layer or not. Because as I have mentioned, once you load the content of a layout, it remains there forever you can only hide it, but it still there and I found using object variables for each object and individual layer for each layout to best way to solve this problem. Donāt know yet which option would be the best, will see. For now Iām going to work on a different way to interact with objects (stations, ships, teleporters for now) and I also have some ideas for UI design.
I have also noticed the readme file was not formatted correctly for windows as Iām using linux, now I have included 2 readmes one is formatted for linux one is formatted for windows.
Okay, as I donāt really see any activity around the project but I would like to really make it and slowly Iām going to work on it whenever I have some free time, I decided to consider this project as my own personal project, but Iām continue to share the project files under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License to keep encourage the community to join as on my own probably i canāt complete the game in such quality and scale as I would. The reason I have choose this license is because I donāt want to let anybody to make changes without sharing them but I donāt know if a source code license can be used here, so for now I decided to let nobody to build upon the project and share it in any ways. I wouldnāt mind to let anyone to do anything with the project files as long the changes are shared, but I donāt know at the moment which license should I use for such project. If anybody have any suggestion or maybe some people find more free time to join the development even with any suggestions, ideas, Iāll come back to the question of license to make more ācommunity projectā friendly.
In the future, Iām going to share information about the project in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=37&t=5505
This topic is no longer relevant.
There is an other community project recently started but there was no activity on the forum for some time:
They have their own discord channel, you can find a link on the GitHub page.
