Coming soon: Starbase Defense

Those are all interesting ideas. Numbers 5 (experience), 7 (ships sets), and 8 (cloaking) were actually already on my "nice to have" list. I need to get the game into a fully playable state before I start making promises, though

Re: Tech Tree
Yes, the tech tree is a little thin at the moment. There will be some expansion in that area. I can think of at least 3 tech areas that are not visible in the screenshot but are definitely planned. Also, the major tech areas (armor, weapons) will provide access to 3-5 components each at a minimum, compared to 1-2 from stock SE5.

Re: Combat
I haven't started coding the combat engine yet. I'll probably start in the next week or two since the main interface is almost complete. Some planning is already done, however. It will be similar to SE5's tactical combat: your ships will behave semi-intelligently on their own, but you can also give them manual movement orders.

Progress has been slower recently, but there is indeed progress. Work on the combat engine (C++) has started. It took about a week for me to reacquaint myself with C++ and its quirks, but that's done now. The tedious stuff, loading data files and such, is more than half completed.

Indeed, it'll be tough to do everything by myself. Therefore I may skimp on some of the Direct3D effects and then open up the project for others to help once I have the game in a playable state.

But for now, the only thing harder than doing it myself is trying to do it with people helping me Communication issues, code synchronization, version control...

Glad to see that there's interest in the project!

There was some major progress this weekend! All of the following apply to the combat engine:

- Combat engine can now display SE5's effects: missiles, bolts, selection icons, etc... Support for additional effect types will be added as they are needed.

- Ship selection code is working.

- Ship movement is about 80 percent done. Ships can already fly to their assigned waypoints and avoid collisions. Work to be done includes moving towards / away from targets.

- New feature: custom formations! I can select a group of ships and then draw a line / curve on the screen with the right mouse button. The selected ships will automatically move towards evenly spaced waypoints on the line.

The project is coming along nicely, and real battles should be possible very soon.

More progress to report, including a screenshot of the combat engine:

Enemy ships fire Short Range Missile Arrays at the starbase.

- Ship movement code is about 100 percent done. Only small tweaks expected at this point.
- Point defense is working; seekers can be intercepted
- Directional damage is implemented and working

Most of the "essentials" are now in place. Only a few must-haves remain to be added before the combat engine can run a bare-minimum game. All of the following are relatively easy to add, and should appear in the next week or so:

- Beam weapon support has not been added yet
- Ship death animations have not been added yet
- Results reporting has not been added

There are still lots of things to be added, though, before a public release can be expected. Most of the following items are requirements for a public release:

- Combat mini-map
- Damage reports
- Manual attack orders
- Sounds effects (possibly tricky, as I have no sound experience)
- Maybe: Pause/slow buttons
- Maybe: RTS-style unit groups

Yes, I can crank up the point defense to a 50ms recharge time. It looks pretty neat vs. the Short Range Missile Arrays, which fire six missiles per salvo. I just ran a simulation with 70 ships, all armed with SRMs and 50ms PD. Ran smoothly, and LOTS of explosions going off. Bwuahahaha...

I don't know if any algorithms would translate between the applications. Differing data structures would probably make that impossible. In my case, I determine whether each shot is going to hit or not as it's being fired (before it actually hits). Once a seeker is guaranteed to be intercepted then other point defense will ignore it.

I use a QuadTree data structure to to store seekers so that it's efficient for PD weapons to locate nearby seekers without iterating over every projectile that's been fired.

Yes, the starbase can be armed, and players can upgrade it. However, I'm still trying to decide how best to discourage "lame" tactics such as filling the entire starbase with armor slots...

Weapons mounted on the starbase are somewhat inefficient due to firing arcs. The starbase rotates, so unless you're completely surrounded, most of your weapons will only be able to fire 33% of the time (firing arcs are +/- 60 degrees).

This thread is becoming a bit like a blog

The latest progress includes an enemy ship designer, lots of component additions, and balancing.

Enemy ship designer
My first idea was to have a hard-coded pool of enemy ship designs which the game could choose from as it researched the proper tech levels. But then I realized this would be a major hassle for modders (and myself), since all the enemy ships would need to be updated if the component list changed.

So I had to take the harder approach of writing a ship designer which could create semi-decent designs from an arbitrary component list. The tricky part was to also make the designer aware of firing arcs, directional armor, etc... I'm pretty happy with the results so far. Yes, the program does create some extremely lousy designs on occasion (no front armor, etc...) but most of the designs are good enough.

Besides, the computer player will have a slight cash advantage

Components Galore
The game already includes a whole ton of fully functional weapons and components. Here's the ever-growing list:

Armor
Armor - Standard 5kt light armor
Heavy Armor - 15tk super-dense armor. More efficient than light armor, but only large ships can afford to cover all directions with heavy armor.
Emissive Armor - Negates damage from smaller and rapid-fire weapons. You need heavy guns to punch through Emissive Armor.
Voltaic Armor - Absorbs 50%+ of the damage from energy weapons and dumps that energy into your ship's batteries; makes your own ship's energy weapons fire faster

Missile Weapons
Capital Ship Missile: Everybody's favorite
Short Range Missile Array: Fires a salvo of 6 short-range missiles. Great at keeping point - defense busy, but lousy vs. emissive armor.
Smart Missile: The guidance systems on this missile make it 3x more likely to hit unarmored components (i.e. find holes in your armor)

Ballistic Weapons
AC/20, AC/30, AC/50, AC/100: Autocannons in a range of sizes. Similar to SE5's depleted uranium cannons.
Fragmentation Cannon: A cheap but erratic weapon, sometimes doing as little as 1 damage.
Gauss Rifle: The sniper's favorite. Long range, high power, slow reload.
Vulcan Cannon: Weighing in at 125kt, only the largest ships can afford to mount this behemoth. It fires an impressive 20 rounds per second, perforating anything in its path.

Energy Weapons
The energy weapons in Starbase Defense work differently than in SE5. All energy weapons require a certain amount of power in order to fire. Ships can have batteries, which store large amounts of charge for later, and generators, which produce smaller amounts of power to recharge weapons and batteries.

Energy weapons tend to work much better on small ships (unlike the ballistic weapons) because the ship's hull produces a certain amount of "free" power.

Meson Blaster: You know you love it.
Anti - Proton Beam: An extremely accurate beam weapon, great for shooting down pesky small ships.
Positron Beam: A dirt-cheap beam weapon, ideal for creating swarms of expendable ships.
Disrupter Beam: Quad damage to intenals. Crappy vs. armor, though.
Incinerator Beam: Massive, slow, powerful. Needs lots of batteries or generators.
Gatling Phasor: Don't you think the Enterprise would look cooler with rapid-fire, spinning phasor banks?
Phased - Polaron Beam: Penetrates shields.

And more! The above is just a partial list of components implemented so far. I didn't include point defense and some of the more mundane stuff.

Anyone who wants to try the game can now download an early beta version. The game is playable, but still need lots of polish before 1.0 release (the combat interface is BARE MINIMUM right now, and needs much UI work). The purpose of this beta version is to get some feedback.

Download starbase defense beta

Unzip the files to any folder on your computer, but DO NOT overwrite your SE5 files! Run the "Starbase Defense.exe" program in order to play the game. You must have SE5 installed.

FAQ
Q: How do I move the camera in combat?
A: Drag with the middle mouse button. Or, use the arrow keys. The mouse wheel zooms, or you can use Page Up and Page Down on the keyboard.

Q: When does combat end?
A: Combat lasts about 3 minutes at the maximum. Combat can end sooner if your starbase is destroyed or the enemy fleet is disabled.

Q: Can I mod the game?
A: Yes, please do! Component definitions are very similar to SE5's (but not exactly the same, so you can't copy something from SE5 exactly).

Q: How do firing arcs work?
A: The grid of your ship design is broken into different sections. Place your weapons into slots corresponding to the direction in which you want the weapon to fire:
F = Fore
L = Left
R = Right
A = Aft
T = Turret, can fire in all directions
Firing arcs are +/- 60 degrees, so there's a little bit of overlap between adjacent directions.

Q: How does directional damage work?
A: Incoming fire can come from four directions: top, left, right, or bottom. For example, if your ship is hit from the front then the game will pick a random occupied column in your design layout. Scanning from top to bottom, the first component it finds will take the hit.

I forgot to mention that the game requires the Microsoft .Net Framework (version 2) to be installed. Some computers may already have it installed. If not, you can find it here:

Download .NET Framework 2.0

Also, be sure you're starting the Starbase Defense program instead of SBDCombat.

Is the problem repeatable? In other words, if you click the Next Wave button again, does it crash all over?

If you have a repeatable problem then I'd appreciate it if you could send a copy of your saved game (assuming you saved it, of course). The saved games are located in the following location:

Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Starbase Defense\

Just zip up the appropriate folder. My address is rogercnorris on gmail.com.

Take a look at the settings.txt file. You can change the number of waves, the amount of money that the enemy gets for each wave, etc... You could make the game last much longer if you wanted to.

Just be careful - if the enemy fleet gets too large then the game will crash. I haven't put safeguards in yet.

No, this game is strictly defensive for now.

For the moment the tonnage numbers are fixed for each ship class. I don't currently allow formulas for ship tonnage. But it's certainly possible to make that value into a formula which could change via research.

Also, there have been several UI improvements recently. I may post an updated version at the end of the weekend.

I took a break from this project in order to work on an SE5 map editor. Things will probably pick back up again in a couple weeks.

Open up the task manager. Can you see "Starbase Defense.exe" in the list of processes? The first thing you're supposed to see is a small menu with buttons to start a new game, continue, or load a different game.

Also, if you have the Steam version of SE5 then Starbase Defense probably won't work (yet). I discovered that issue while working on the map editor. It will take a minor code change in order to handle the Steam version.

Source code sent. You might want to cover your eyes for the C++ stuff, though. It's nowhere near release-quality. I was totally new to Direct 3D, so I was more concerned with just getting it to work than making the code clean or elegant.

Yeah, that about sums it up. It was a fun project while it lasted, but my motivation has waned considerably. There have been a few minor improvements since the last public version, so I'll try to post one more update. The post-battle report is now more useful. There were some bug fixes, also... but now I can't remember what they were!