Naev - Naev Development Blarg (Page 20)

Next steps to 0.5.0

BY BOBBENS, ON AUGUST 23RD, 2010

I’ve been asked multiple times what the ETA for 0.5.0 is. For now, the answer is “when it’s done”, but going over the TODO, it seems like it’ll be around New Years. Many of our original goals are done, but the list seems to grow faster than features are finished; here’s what’s left:

Weapon Revamp – Removes secondary weapons in favour of dynamic player-defined weapon groups (WIP).
Tech Editor – Incorporate a technology editor to allow balancing technology and the likes much faster.
Finish GUI – With the weapon revamp we should be finally able to get a new awesome epic GUI done. This builds upon the Lua infrastructure we now have for GUI development.
Finish Electronic Warfare – One of the major 0.5.0 objectives. It’s more or less implemented, but needs to actually have the outfits and ships use it. The major issue is balancing, which is complex to say the least. This is when we merge ewarfare into bigsys.
Advanced Time Compression – Sick of flying around slow in your big capital ship? Dynamic time compression will make travel fast and fluid when out of combat. When you enter combat you’ll revert to your ship’s normal handling characteristics. This is mainly to allow large slow ships to be less tedious to fly, especially in big systems.
Overlay Map – We want a Diablo 2-style map overlay in the big systems, the current infrastructure isn’t cutting it. With big systems there’s so many things in each system it’s hard to keep track of things in the minimap. An overlay will allow you to see whole systems, more or less, without sacrificing the minimap’s usefulness in combat. You’ll be able to toggle it on command.
Finish Big Systems – With the overlay and electronic warfare done we want to finally complete big systems. This means systems will be even larger and you’ll have intra-system travel and combat. Time compression will make it all painless and the overlay will make it so you don’t get lost. This is when everything gets merged into master.
Beam Rewrite – Beam weapons are due for a makeover. They’re currently an awful hack. They shall be moved into their own infrastructure and be upgraded to comply with OpenGL ES specification. The AI will also start using them efficiently.
Mouse Usage – Target cycling is cute, but when each system has 30+ ships in visible range, selecting a specific ship is tedious. This will allow mouse targeting and limited mouse flying (have the ship face the mouse, etc.) among other things.
Heavy Testing – This is a huge release, so a beta will likely be released. NAEV is typically quite stable and bug-free, but we’d like to avoid pure-maintenance releases in 0.5.*. We’ve had our share of embarrassing bugs during past releases and we don’t want that to happen again.

As you can see there’s a lot of stuff left. That’s a lot of work not to mention all the new content we’re getting done in parallel. You might think that 0.5.0 is the end of the line but we have many many more ideas which will most likely be for 0.6.0. So as you can see we aren’t being lazy nor inefficient, we’re just overly-ambitious. The end goal is to have 0.5.0 be a mature and stable platform for which all you modders and content developers will be able to mess with. Anyway, bear with us, this release is going to be epic. Most of you who only played up to 0.4.2 will have to relearn the entire game as it’s much more advanced. However don’t fear the change, it’s for the better and has been all heavily discussed and analyzed before being implemented. If you still worry, feel free to grab a copy of the ‘ewarfare’ branch on git and drop us some a line on IRC, the forum or the mailing list.

Some stats to give you an indication of the magnitude of the change:

bobbens@ghanima (~/usr/prj/naev)] $ git diff NAEV-0.4.2 | wc -l 78621

Yes, that’s nearly 80k line changes in the diff from the latest version and that’s with the gigantic TODO we have left. Scary, huh?

Bobbens out.

Background effects: Improving screenshots since 2010.

BY DEIZ, ON AUGUST 16TH, 2010

Space is an immense, largely vacuous void. The ratio of nothingness to interesting phenomena is pitifully high. Among even those rare phenomena, the amount perceptible by the human eye pales in comparison to wider-wavelength recording combined with false colours.

Fortunately, however, NAEV is a game, not a simulator. It’s a bit boring to fly over endless blackness with nothing but stars to keep you company. Ships and large planets, while pretty, come and go with alarming rapidity.

To that end, we’ve endeavoured to make NAEV more visually enticing by implementing support for background graphics. In all, there are more than 30 backgrounds, with more to come, hopefully. I suppose it’s time to let the pictures do the talking (Note: They’re much larger in-game):

NOTE The screenshots have been lost to time :(

Save the Events!

BY BOBBENS, ON AUGUST 12TH, 2010

After a post in the forum reminded me that it’s stupid that events can’t save themselves. I have decided to correct that. So finally after ages of having events sort of naturally die we have persistent events. Events work different from missions and in this aspect too. For an event to be saved you must explicitly tell it to be saved with evt.save(). This will make it save itself. Also added sanity checks, but there is always the danger (unlike with missions) that an event goes crazy and can’t complete. The player since he has no control over this won’t be able to eliminate it and over time we may have an issue with event bloat in save games. Hopefully this won’t happen since I’ve added checks for the common cause of events becoming inert, which is not having any hooks.

Either way I hope having events can lead to a more dynamic universe in the sense that some small scripted actions can appear randomly. Something like scientists screaming in falling elevators but in outer space. So keep your eyes open for scripted coolness in development version (or 0.5.0 when it’s released).

Arch Linux: NAEV now included in Community repository.

BY DEIZ, ON JULY 29TH, 2010

The packages (naev and naev-data) are still quite new, so some mirrors may not have synced yet.

Special thanks to cleanrock, who created and maintained the Arch User Repository PKGBUILD, and to those who voted for NAEV’s inclusion in the official repositories, without which we’d likely not be packaged.

NAEV forum added.

BY DEIZ, ON JULY 24TH, 2010

To complement this blog, we’ve now added a forum to the site.

It’s somewhat bare at the moment, but it should provide a good venue for feedback, and it’s certainly a more familiar format for many users who aren’t used to mailing lists and IRC channels.

The observant NAEV players among you may have noticed that the blog and forum logos differ from what’s in-game (as of 0.4.2). That’s thanks to Scaatis, and there’s a forum thread on the art he’s contributed here: (NOTE This linked to the lost forums). Typographical geeks may notice that the new logo is in fact an ambigram.

In time we’ll also roll out a proper (non-Google Code) Wiki here on naev.org and integrate it with the forum.