Naev - Naev Development Blarg (Page 20)

NAEV 0.4.2 is now available in openSUSE

BY DEIZ, ON NOVEMBER 12TH, 2010

While development continues towards 0.5.0, increased availability of the current stable release is always a good thing. NAEV can now be found in the openSUSE Games repository.

See here (this link is dead :() for downloadable packages for openSUSE 11.3. There are also packages built for a number of other RPM-based distributions, including Mandriva and Fedora listed by the build servicehere (this link is dead :(), downloadable from here (this link is dead :(). It appears that you’ll need the naev and naev-data packages; after installing both, NAEV should be ready to play.

Big Big Systems

BY BOBBENS, ON NOVEMBER 10TH, 2010

So what happens when you take big systems and inject them with pure essence of big? You get Big Big Systems. How big are we talking? If an old system maybe had an effective radius of 3.75 kpx or so, now we have radius of 25 kpx. That’s a pretty big increase. How long does it take to fly across it? It’s likely faster than before thanks to dynamic time compression.

A brief overview of how this is handled; There are currently two ways to trigger dynamic time compression:

Activate autonav
Right click on the overlay map

What it does, essentially, is increase the time compression until your ship reaches an “effective” speed of 2500 m/s. That means all ships behave nearly identically, be it capital ship or light fighter. This means that capital ships are much more playable now.

Can’t leave you without a pretty screenshot, so this is what a big big system looks like. As you can see there’s a YOU and GOTO on the map and dynamic time compression is at 27.1x. My Empire Hawking is flying from YOU to the GOTO. On the map overlay you can also see friendlies flying nearby.

So what’s next? Balance. Balance? Balance! It’s going to still take a while, but it’ll be damn well worth it. For those following Git, big big systems are still in the balance branch and haven’t been merged into bigsys yet.

NOTE The screenshot has been lost to time :(

Mouse Targeting

BY BOBBENS, ON OCTOBER 24TH, 2010

Possibly what could be considered the last of the large planned features has been implemented. This is mouse targeting. Well what does mouse targeting mean. It has two implications, the first is that in the regular game screen while flying around you can now target ships. However you can also target jump points, planets and ships with the overlay map. This means that you do not necessarily have to go through long boring cycles to try to select a ship to board, or a ship on the map.

Hopefully the feature will be cool and enjoyable for all. If someone doesn’t exactly like the implementation or think it could be better (or more natural) don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Finally, what is next? Well now we have the long complicated task of balancing and implementing new outfits. This daunting task will be done in the “balance” branch as it will most likely mess up everything. We’ve already integrate some of the ideas from the forums like the damage rejection. It seems like we may be ahead of schedule for 0.5.0, but I make no promises.

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 :(