NebulaRider - Tale of a new project

[a_bertrand]

Hi guys, as some of you knows, I'm working on a new game myself since May of this year. The game name is NebulaRider and will be more or less a game like EvE online but in 2D, run within your browser and mostly free (premium membership will exists).

To develop it I choose to use Silverlight which is not that common for game development so far even if I started to see some great development going with it. What Silverlight is in 2 words? Basically a flash replacement written by Microsoft. Yet instead of having some crappy language (ActionScript for flash), Microsoft decided to use their own .NET technology which allows you to code in VB.NET, C# or any other .NET language (yes even IronPython). So you have true OO languages, and great tools to develop an not some baby toy editor.

On the other side, Silvelright is not as widly installed as flash, but for me it is not really an issue. If people accept to download clients to play a game, why shouldn't they install Silverlight?

So since May I develop this game (with initially some help from some friend which didn't worked that well) and it is slowly growing and getting more and more features. My wish is to have it ready to be played (but of course never really finished) by the end of the year.

The current home page is mainly a place holder and will be replaced with a better one before the beta phase, and the current live game is certainly not the final version, more a tech demo than anything else.

So far I'm happy by how it is going, even if I faced some difficulties, like how do I store the game state, how do I avoid (at least partially) cheating, how do I make the players see each others and interact (chat), etc... so if you are interested in some areas please tell me what, and I will try on my side to keep you informed about how it is going.

[Curt]

The game is looking great. I will be looking forward to watching this game progress.

Come on guys, Lets show some support for this project as it is looking very promising already in my eyes...

Layout is clean and attractive :)

Have fun with it a_bertrand :D

[Djkanna]

Oh I remember the days when it was just talking about it, now it's there :O

Hehe, good luck with it buddy. (:

[a_bertrand]

Well it's a slow process, as the game is a lot more complex in code as it may look like by just testing it, but yes it's progressing, and yes it is not just another vaporware ;)

[medz]

Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834

 

HTML5??

[Guest George]

I personally really like your idea of using silverlight as not many developers tend to try new things. It is a really cool concept. Only the text on your template does not look sci-fi.Good Luck on your project!

[a_bertrand]

medz: no way I could code what I did in HTHL 5. Simply put Javascript is way not enough for what I'm doing (like introspections and reflection) as well as other things. Also support of HTML 5 is kinda... risky:

IE 9 will not run on XP and is not yet here

Firefox 4 is also not here

Yet to make things worse, IE, FF and Chrome DO NOT share the same "standards". So even if you get a pretty quick HTML rendering via DirectX it's by no mean as powerful as what you can do with Silverlight. Also development time in Javascript is much longer that the same kind of results in Silverlight.

So honestly for this game HTML 5 is not an option, not at all actually.

George: which template text? The home page or the in game look?

[medz]

Flash or Html5

All companies and browsers will support html5,silverlight is not an option in fact.Even flash is only a temporary solution.But flash is better at this time.

[a_bertrand]

Flash would be more supported indeed, but the language behind is really not much better than Javascript and for the coding the tools are not up to par with what Visual Studio offers. So no flash for me is not a good choice.

Also, I'm certainly not the only developer in Silverlight you may check this game for example:

http://warstory.bigpoint.com/en

And as said HTML5 is not the way to develop this kind of games. Plus who want to distribute their sources for free? As Javascript MUST be distributed... No thanks!

And don't talk about obfuscation as that's not protecting much.

BTW, that's an official MS post: http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/the-future-of-silverlight/

[a_bertrand]

Also, if you check sites like:

http://www.unhcr.org/microsoft/

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/interactives/photosynth/

http://www.silverlight.net/showcase/

You see silverlight is not just something I use in my garage and that it's used for a wide variety of things.

[Guest George]

I mean to say that the Logo text, it's not very futuristic. But other then that I liked some of the features you showed us! Silverlight will most likely become more popular as it is something just waiting to be used!

[a_bertrand]

Some progress on the AI of the enemy ships have been done. Now the AI have 5 different levels, from the most stupid one (where enemies trying to fire you could hit a "friend" which stand between) to the "smartest" AI I currently made which tries to always stand BEHIND you, and avoid to hit its friends.

Maps also have a RISK level, from 0 (fully safe) to 7. Based on the risk level the AI of the enemies will be set as well as how many enemies per map there is.

I fixed also a nasty bug which could have prevented some of you to even try the game. The bug was involving the PC local settings and if your decimal separator wasn't a . would have prevented the game to work. Now the game should be system independent for what regards the number formats ;)

Loads of other small works have been done (like a new galaxy map viewer as well as a new galaxy map)...

[Curt]

Very nice, I will be riding the nebula shortly and try to come up with some more ideas for you :)

[a_bertrand]

Ok half a day and more spent on some interesting optimization.

Problem:

In my universe some "sectors" are filled by nasty asteroid fields. Asteroids will break your ship if you fly into them, and the field overall rotate slowly around it's center.

To check if an asteroid collide with some ship, I used the old and trusty Pythagoras algorithm. Basically with it I calculate the distance between the 2 points if the distance is smaller than the sum of the 2 radius (radius of the ship + radius of the asteroid) then there is a collision.

Of course the asteroid field is not filled with just a couple of asteroid but more like 200 per map. That means doing over 200 Pythagorean calc for each ship.

Solution:

One of the many solution is to use a so called "grid accelerator" which is used for example in 3d rendering software. This algorithm simply "cut" the space in a grid. If you make the cells very small you will use more memory and may have some overhead for objects which are across multiple cells, if your grid cells are too big you will gain nearly nothing. Yet what does that bring? Simply you look for objects on one or more cells but not on the overall map. Which means you will do a lot less calculations and which result in an higher speed.

Results:

Before optimization I got around 20 frames per second in the asteroid field... if not 10 FPS... Now I'm running at 40 FPS so between 2 and 4x as much, and 40 FPS is the limit I set (to avoid to have ship flying too fast).

Lesson:

don't drop good ideas just because they are too slow, maybe there is ways to make it run at the right speed even if you need to dig a bit to find it out.