Slick Forums

I figured I should start posting updates about the strategy game I'm working on here.
My goals are to create a real time 4X space strategy game.
Currently, I have a disk galaxy creation created, tactical zoom, fleets and star travel lanes.
Next I plan on finishing pathfinding for starfleets from one star to the next.


Update Feb. 23, 2012



Older screenshots:
Short video of me showing off the zoom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnoL_B8T-4

hi!
Really good! I'm developing a similar game but with kind of zoom is really code, do you have some feedback how to achieve this kind of effect ?

Thanks!

_________________
Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

Ok. How I did a supreme commander style zoom in my 4x space game.

Variables:

* In my game engine, I have an absolute coordinate system for each planet and object.
* I then have a camera object that has a variable that tells me which coordinate should be in the middle of the user's monitor.
* I also have the zoom level as a variable.
* And then there is the mouse's location on the screen.

When the user moves the mouse to the edge, the camera changes it's coordinates and all the objects move on screen according to that variable. aka
Absolute coordinate + Camera Location = Display location

They key is that when you zoom in, and zoom out the location of the mouse must stay the same in the absolute cordinate system not the display coordinates.
So that means you need logic like this each time the user zooms in and out.

1. Calculate where the mouse is in the absolute coordinate system.
2. zoom in/out.
3. Move the camera so that the mouse will be over the location you calculated in step 1 again.

--------------------------------


If you are asking how I made the zoom rate steady, then.... To do that I used 1.03^(inverse of the zoom) for the zoom speed. aka

And z is the inverse of the zoom. ex: If I was zoomed out where everything was half size, z=2.

I am able to achieve something similar. Here is what I used:


newzoom is the target zoom and the oldzoom is the current zoom. I update the camera x and y positions in the update method as shown above. Then, during the render stage the following code is used:

I've been working on this for a while now and I've finally have:
* Fleets and ships
* Starlanes via a relative neighborhood graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_neighborhood_graph
* Ship movement
* I can now tell I fleet to go to one system to another... but...

Things I plan to work on next:
* Have fleets find out a path through multiple stars/nodes.
* Construct ships
* Specialization of ships

How is it going?

I have decided to stop work on this project. I'm thinking of starting a new game project, maybe a turn based strategy, but definitively not an rts.

Maybe I'll re-purpose the engine into a space adventure (like privateer), but trying to create the fleet management while keeping the fps up made this project very hard to seriously complete.