ShipBasher Development Log 7: Moving

Updates have been scarce lately! The latest excuse I have is that I spent the last month preparing to move, moving, and then entertaining family members who came to visit. I have a lot of junk, so it took an embarrassing number of trips back and forth to load up a pair of storage units (the small ones were on sale so I saved money eschewing a single large unit) and then unload them.

On topic, I finally got back to work again and have spent most of my time focusing on adding gameplay functionality. The saving and loading system still has a few issues, but I can work around them easily enough that working on the ability to have ships, well, bash each other is feasible once again. As I mentioned in the last entry, long ago I had all this working on its own, but making ships load from files intact and then work is another layer of complexity. I started by tackling the task of making them able to move once again, which of course began with slapping on some engines:

Here we can see the return of the nice pretty modules I modeled way back when (still devoid of proper UV maps) and, more spectacularly, some big changes to the UI. I showed them a little in the previous post but didn't say anything about the topic, which in retrospect I really should have. ShipBasher has had a shift in intended user experience: rather than a separate ship editor and play mode (and possible level editor), I decided to roll them all up into one single "sandbox." The idea is that the player can open the sandbox with a fresh, empty volume of space, construct multiple ships in it, position them, and have the option to save individual ships or the entire level. At any time it will be possible to switch into "play mode" and let the ships fight, controlling one or more as desired, and to pause the simulation to re-enter editing mode. Saved levels could be shared with other players as challenges, in which editing may be restricted or unavailable. In light of these changes, the UI here features a number of windows for editing ships and their modules. I probably will make an entire post about the UI later.

Reintegrating all of these modules into the game meant extending my editable data system to work with custom-built module models and their corresponding behaviors. I decided to make use of Unity's Asset Bundle system, which provides the ability to package up arbitrary assets separately from the game's compiled data and load them during play. I engineered a system to open these asset bundle files, search them for module prefabs and text files dictating their properties, and pass them on to the editable data system so that they could be configured. After much work, I had that modules menu in the lower right working so that it was possible to spawn specific modules and attach them to the ship.

Once that was out of the way, I could get to doing the thing I mentioned back at the beginning of this post - making the modules I had spawned work. This was mostly a matter of trial and error in the form of putting things together similarly to how they were before and then figuring out which steps I had missed. Eventually I had exhaust coming out and the ships awkwardly pushing themselves around:

And once that was done, and I had debugged some issues with the ships completely failing to move in productive ways in favor of impotently drifting and spinning, I slapped together a simple gun turret and, once it was (guess what) debugged, could finally watch with joy as they flung white beads at each other:

Hooray! At last ShipBasher is fully operatio- except no, not only is this not even close but these "bullets" have no ability to do any damage nor even collide with other ships. They just drift through like ghosts until they despawn. But hey, it at least looks like a space battle is going on now, which I consider a milestone. Also visible at the top are "play" and "pause" buttons I threw in. They work in a superficial manner now, but properly suspending the operation of all the different gameplay systems I've made and properly resuming them is a much more complicated matter.

The last and most recent feature I've begun to address is restoring weapon damage, which due to the plans I have for later on I figured would be easier to implement with lasers than bullets. Thus I set about making a laser turret as well. I had already created most of the subsystems this includes, such as the turret and "line beam" components I made available a while back on the Unity Asset Store, so this turned out not to be too difficult, though I did encounter one amusing issue I'm anxious to address:

See the detached modules hovering in the center of the image? It turned out that by allowing my laser beam to damage the other ship's modules, I made it possible to destroy those modules, as the ability of modules to despawn when too damaged was already present, merely unused. This led to a problem because what I hadn't yet done was program what should happen when modules leave their assigned ship, so I started getting scolded in the debug console about ships having zero mass (due to having no modules attached) and modules being unable to figure out which ship was theirs because, due to their parent modules having been destroyed, they were no longer attached to any ship! More amusingly, because I designed ships to use a single Rigidbody component rather than assigning one to every module, these detached modules had none and thus immediately stopped still where they were and became immovable. I think I know what I need to address next.

So yeah, that's the story of me moving in real life and also making spaceships move in my video game.

Typing this up, it became clear to me that I really need to blog about what I'm doing more frequently. I tried dialing it back after like ten posts about the editable data system, but clearly I went too far and have thus had to do a lot of hurried review. I haven't even covered everything I've accomplished since the last entry and will have to make another one to avoid turning this one into a monstrosity.