Fleet Viewer

The new MekaWars' Fleet Viewer

MekaWars meets Gun-Tactyx

Yesterday I cited the space marines that populate the starships during battles.

Space marines defending the
central area of a module

My idea was to develop the MekaWars control unit system (as you may already know, in MekaWars the players develop the AI of their units - that's how MekaWars is meant to be played) and recycle it for Gun-Tactyx-2 (that is the sequel of Gun-Tactyx).
Then, recently, I had a more interesting idea: why don't merge the two projects? This brought to an additional mechanic of the game.
During starship battles, hits can destory a unit (producing wreckage that is going to be collected), but starship modules can't. The latter are only disabled, but hulls may be robbed of their resources (up to a certain percentage).
The additional mechanics is: before materials can be brought away from a module, a space marine unit must assault it and defeat the defending troops. Here is where the Gun-Tactyx fight-style comes in.
You can imagine hard fights between starships and, at the end, you'll see assault units moving to the modules; then the attention is focused on the inner corridors of the modules, where attackers fight the defenders (as in the initial scene of the first Star Wars movie) to steal the contained resources or the whole module.

Space marine on an assault
unit waiting for the attack

MekaWars' dungeons

The starships concept included in MekaWars was extended and improved. Additional modules apart (research module to develop the projects from which devices, units and ships are designed; factory module to effectively build devices, units and new modules), the ships have now got a crew.
I'm not talking about the pilots of units or the captains of the ships (or even the admiral that commands the fleet), but there are also the space marines that defend the ships from outer attacks.
I'll descibe them more deeply tomorrow. For the moment give a look to the starship's corridors.

Starship's corridors

MekaWars' stellar systems

Yesterday I talked about the Galaxy. Today is the time of stellar systems.

The star, one planet with a moon
and a fleet exiting the hyperspace

Each sector of the Galaxy contains a stellar system. The prototype of the system is given by a star, with several planets, each with its moons.
The asteroids rich of resources will be located in that environment, so the units must scan the space to avoid the star, planets and moons and look for asteroids or enemy units.
I already told of a different combat system. One of the differences is: once a unit (fighter, harvester, exoskeleton etc.) is destroyed its deviced will be available as wreckage, after the explosion. Special units will look for that wreckage to collect it and bring it to the fleet hulls. Then such devices will be used to assemble other units or sold to other players.
Some ship will mount research modules and factory modules to build units, but collecting devices from enemy players will save a lot of energy and resources.

MekaWars' Galaxy

MekaWars Offline will feature a strategic map like the one you can see below.

MekaWars' strategic map

Each player has got a sector to manage, separated from other players by neutral sectors.
A fleet can travel from sector to sector through hyperjumps, because travels among stellar systems needs too time being performed at sub-light speeds.
A fleet can jump in a neutral sector only if no more than two fleets are already there (well, one can jump, but it's almost sure that the fleet will appear too near to the star to survive).
Then there are three possibilities: if no fleet is there, the harvesters can freely work to collect resources (the usual iron, silicon and uranium) to research and produce new devices, units and ship modules; if there is a friendly fleet that is already harvesting, the cargos can commerce exchanging materials; finally, if there is an enemy fleet, a battle could take place.
A new kind of battles, different from the usual ones described in past posts and shown in the demo, will be available, but let's discuss it in one of the next posts.
Different rules apply when a fleet enters the sector where the base of a player is located: only one enemy fleet at a time can enter and enough time since the last attack must have passed.
Just an additional note about resources: asteroids rich in uranium (useful to produce energy) will be more frequent near the center of the galaxy, the silicon (useful to build devices) will have an higher density along the border, while iron (necessary to build any kind of structure) will be located more frequently in between.

MekaWars' simulator

Almost three months have passed since the last post. I was quite busy and it was impossible for me to publish the promised daily post.
However recently I've found some spare time to spend and I used it to continue the development of MekaWars Offline. In particular I have successfully ported the already working Lua simulator to C++, so very large starship battles are going to be possible.
The port wasn't very difficult, because the Lua code was already object oriented, and the final result is more mantainable and error proof.

CodeBlocks & Borland C++ at work
to compile the MekaWars simulator

As you may know, MekaWars Offline is a project different from MekaWars Online. In fact, the latter is going to be played online among a large number of users, who are going to manage their empire like in other browser games, but its core will be the battle simulator of MekaWars Offline. This one will be more similar to a mixture of JRobots and Gun-Tactyx (where the players are only going to share the algorithms of their bots), as I'm going to describe in the next posts.

Total War

Just a screenshot

One vs All

Just a screenshot

Harvesters

Just a screenshot

New MekaWars demo!

The second MekaWars demo is finally here!
You can download MekaWars.zip from SourceForge (2.5 Mb)

Since the first demo was very primitive, this new preview includes several improvements:

• a static initialization screen
• an options screen with animated models
• users can choose the number of units
• radar tracks shown in the 2D viewer
• two different programmable teams
• improved info and Lua documentation
• a Lua language programs editor

Please, report any problem that you can experience with the new demo and feel free to post here comments, suggesions and constructive criticisms about the MekaWars simulator.

The 2nd MekaWars demo (II)

The second MekaWars preview is almost completed. In the screenshot you can see a preliminary mask to modify the number of items in the arena. The upload is scheduled for tomorrow afternooon.

The 2nd MekaWars demo

The second MekaWars preview is under development. The next demo is going to include some masks useful to personalize the test arena. Stay tuned!

MekaWars' radars

Very soon you'll be able to play with an improved MekaWars demo. In the current version, published a few days ago, there is very little to change: the starting situation is always the same, but you can already try to modify the basic AI written in "pilot.lua". Then, there is no documentation and some important features of the 2D viewer are still missing, like the drawing of the radar tracks (very useful to understand if the pilot's view of the surrounding environment is optimal).

In the next to come version, you'll get a short Lua manual to understand the differences between Lua and the other languages that you may already know, then a few dialogs to modify some properties of the playground and, finally, the radar tracks.
Stay tuned! The new demo will be available in just a few days.

MekaWars official site

The MekaWars official site is already online.

Not much to do on the site yet: it's simply a placeholder for the future official site that is going to manage the MekaWars universe, infact the game is still in heavy development. However, you can play a little with the very early preview the link of which was posted a few days ago on this Blog.
Improved versions with more documentation will be available soon, but be aware that, while the simulator behind the scenes is stable in its design, the "real thing" will be graphically much better, of course!

Banners in Flash (II)

Another banner in Flash freely created through PowerBullet.

I think that this new one is cleaner and more readable than my two-months-old past attempt. The banner already links to the official MekaWars site, but the site and the game are still in development. While waiting for the final version, give a look at the very early 2D preview posted yesterday.

MekaWars very early demo

Since a reader has asked for it, I have uploaded a very early demo showing the MekaWars simulator at work. Don't expect too much: it's only the 2D viewer that I used in the past four weeks to capture a few screenshots and demonstrate some of the simulator features.
You can download the MekaWars very early demo (1.5 Mb) from SourceForge. Just for blog readers' eyes only.

Here just a few notes follow to describe what is available in this very simple demo (read the included readme.htm file for more details).
First of all, let's explain how to play. MekaWars is not going to be an interactive space combat simulator: it is based on the same design of JRobots, thus it is a "programming-game", those games where players program the AI of their team of bots and then watch them fight against other players' teams.
In the demo, you can experience only a few features of the real simulator and the situation at the beginning is always repetitive: 2 fighters and 6 harvesters that always start from the same positions, while asteroids and resources change the position at random. In practice, you must fight against yourself to see some action.
To develop the pilots' AI, you must program in Lua the file 'pilota.lua', that already features a few lines of simple behaviors. In the readme.htm, you can read a short list of the available functions.
Feel free to ask for any additional explanation and stay tuned for more interesting, more complete and more playable demos.

MekaWars trailer (VI)

Space station

Twilight on the sun

Orbiting fighters

MekaWars trailer (V)

Fleet flying over a planet

Fighters in an asteroid field

Orbiting fighters

Incoming missiles (II)

Just another radar-screenshot

MekaWars trailer (IV)

Just another screenshot