spaced jase

Lately I've been experimenting with the Galaxy view detailed in an earlier post. Mainly, just getting the systems to appear halfway decent and show some information about each one to the user. So I needed to have a UI element with tooltip type behaviour. I quickly prototyped a UserInterfaceManager which contained a list of UI elements, extended into various different objects. In the video below, it’s a ‘SystemTooltip’, which inherits from BaseTooltip, which then inherits from UIElement. On my main game play loop I simply do:

And it shows right where I want it. For the style of the window/tooltips, I created a basic window in Photoshop then cut it down to some elements, much like Web Developers would when creating a site, and isolated a couple of horizontal and vertical components of the image that could be stretched/compressed to support any width or height for the window/tooltip. It worked out quite well and its all texture-driven, so I could replace the existing style just by updating the relevant textures, even they are different sizes etc.

I also thought about the first real gameplay element, fleets. A fleet is a group of ships which you send to attack other systems or defend your own systems. It’s represented by an icon (programmer art, ugh) because there may be 10’s or 100’s or ships in the actual fleet and rendering seems pointless, especially since if the ships were drawn to scale, the largest flagship would be something like 0.00000000001 pixels wide, which is of course invisible.

So I place a fixed set of fleets around the galaxy on random systems, then assign them a destination system within a min-max range of their location. The video shows more, click to view the 720p version

The numbers of fleets, even at 2500, seems very high on the estimation scale. I mention 50 players with 50 fleets in the video, but that would never happen. 50 fleets would be too hard to control, unless most of the fleets were stationed in systems as a defensive measure.
It would be more likely that each player would have ~10 fleets, leading to 2500 fleets existing only when 250 players are in the galaxy. On Xbox, the absolute maximum player limit supported by XNA is 31; which means fleet numbers are not likely to exceed 300 at any one time.

On PC however, I’d like to see galaxies in play with 10,000+ fleets competing for 5000 systems, which would mean having to support ~1000 players in the same galaxy.

Possible?

Who knows ;)