Say that you have 30 ships flying around the screen and say that running the collision detection takes 1 millisecond. The game could happily run at 100+ fps this way. Now add 120 bullets and missiles flying around in space. The collision detection alone could only run at 40fps now!

What we have now is a bounding box tree instead of a list. It works by putting a bounding box around each object. As you loop over all the objects, it puts pairs of bounding boxes that are near each other together and puts a bounding box around both of them. If an object doesn’t overlap this larger bounding box, it doesn’t overlap either object. After several layers of grouped bounding boxes like this, you can check if an object doesn’t overlap hundreds of bounding boxes with a single check instead of testing them one by one.

This means that we can put hundreds of bullets, ships, and missiles flying around now and still keep the frame rate a smooth 60fps.

Youtube link

CHANGES SINCE 5.2.0:

• FIX: Fixed the source so it can compile as C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++.
• FIX: Fixed cp_contact_persistence. It was broken so that it would forget collision solutions after 1 frame instead of respecting the value set.
• OPTIMIZATION: Several minor optimizations have been added. Though performance should only differ by a few percent.
• OPTIMIZATION: Chipmunk now supports putting bodies to sleep when they become inactive.
• API: Elastic iterations are now deprecated as they should no longer be necessary.
• API: Added API elements to support body sleeping.
• API: Added a statically allocated static body to each space for attaching static shapes to.
• API: Static shapes attached to the space’s static body can simply be added to the space using cpSpaceAddShape().
• NEW: New MSVC projects.
• NEW: Added boolean and time stamp types for clarity.

We’ve also included the Objective-C wrapper as well as some sample code from shipping iPhone Apps. The primary advantages of a native Objective-C API include integrating with the Cocoa memory management model and the Chipmunk Object protocol. The Chipmunk Object protocol unifies the basic Chipmunk types as well as making it easy to create custom composite collections of the basic types. Additionally, the wrapper adds many convenience methods for doing common setup tasks as well as helper methods that integrate it with the rest of the Cocoa Touch API. The wrapper tries to do things the Objective-C way, adding useful method variations where it makes sense to do so. Objective-Chipmunk is cheap to license and it will definitely save you time and money developing Chipmunk based iPhone apps.

Our goal instead is to use small amounts of text and to shape the world around the quests instead.  Psychochild summarizes the problem nicely in his blog post:

• Many players say they want an engaging story.
• Most players skip the boring text anyway.
• Reality dictates that quest text will be limited.

The point Psychochild makes in his post is that players don’t know what they actually want. This is 90% correct- but I’d rather say that players know what they want, but they have the wrong idea of how to get it. More (or even better) quest text is an obvious solution, since it stares you straight in the face. This is especially in games like WoW, where the quest text is 99% of what makes collecting boar snouts different from collecting murloc eyes. So let us step back from the traditional quest “text description, action, text and reward” model.

Often, showing is better than telling.  The downside, of course, is that doing anything other than blocks of text becomes a lot more work- especially where art comes in to play; that’s been our traditional weakness.

So far, we’ve had good luck with custom scripting on our quests. Since you’re doing something reasonably different on each quest, they feel very unique. There’s more variety than changing a block of text can provide. (We’ll also won’t have 8393 quests, which is the current quest count in WoW) This is also playing towards our personal strengths. It’s easier for Scott and me to script something interesting than to make art or elaborate text stories.

Factions provide a lot of flavor to the world. It’s part of the setting, but more than that, it provides a new way for the player to interact with the world. Different factions will be set to be at war with each other- other factions will come to the aid of their friends.

Meanwhile, the player is in the middle, and their actions will influence how the other factions view them. Running missions can affect your reputation with different factions- and who you blow up also has a significant effect. All in all, this is a pretty typical system- but there’s one concept we’ve found that very cleanly offers some advantages.

The player has separate temporary and permanent reputations with each faction. This offers a great balance between making  yourself a permanent enemy of a trading corporation or just angering a single member. If you’re in good standing with a faction, a few accidental stray shots won’t anger them too much. However, a full blown attack will always have some response from the attacked fleet. Really good relations will cause them to overlook a few destroyed vessels- they give you the benefit of the doubt. But with repeated attacks, they will eventually decide to destroy you on sight.

It’s very neat and tidy.

Scott set up a layer based culling system that massively improves performance as you are zoomed out. It intelligently culls weapon effects and other effects based on their size. Once you’re zoomed out a bit, the gun flares aren’t drawn, but larger effects like missile trails will be drawn. As you zoom out further, even those disappear.

We also added some text messages that can show up in world space. These quick notes tell you how much money you made for destroying something, or how many core samples you’ve retrieved. They’re drawn in 3D in worldspace, so you get some neat effects as you fly past them.

http://www.mupromo.com/deal/1266/4438/upshot

Fleets

Scott has been doing some excellent work, and he’s put together fleets of ships! A fleet is a set of ships that will fly together in formation, and generally look out for eachother. Firing on one ship in a fleet will get the whole group angry at you.

Here we’ve got a 3 fleets on screen, and the player (the green triangle) has a few escorts. Already some of the independent traders have been engaged by another group- probably pirates. The IFF system colors them yellow, since neither party is hostile to the player yet.

We’ll have more information about the faction system in our next post!

A command center floating in space. Click for a larger image.

See all the new buildings!

Rock Busterz Mining Corp Click for a larger image.

Here we’ve got a set of missions near the starting area. I think there’s some good variety. We have a new set of art- we’ve got 10 different space buildings. These add a lot of flavor to the area and make places recognizable and unique. We’ll show more about those later!

This mission string starts off simply- just by shooting some asteroids. After that, there’s some exploration, finding core samples off a missing mining survey ship, destroying the pirates around a new ore location, and finally setting up a new mining base for Rock Busterz.

For more information, see the Upshot page.