Naev Development Blarg (Page 9)
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Naev History
BY SYNCHRO, ON JUNE 21ST, 2021
Howdy!
This post coincides with the 11th year this blog has been up in some form.
In early 2020, the new incarnation of naev.org was born, and with the new site came an unfortunate lack of the older historical posts from the old WordPress Naev site. With Naev being one of the older open source game projects out there (and one my my personal early forays into FOSS games) I realized that the history of this project is a good record to keep.
With more than 10 years of history here it would be a crime not to attempt to restore as much of the old content as possible. With recent updates to the Blarg you can now browse through almost all of the posts from years past; be it explanations of ‘new’ mechanics, past releases, or some extra fun posts. As important as viewing the past is it also lets us see how far this project has come and how far we can continue to expand this awesome game.
On top of all this restored Blarg content, we will be attempting to bring older releases of Naev to modern Linux and Windows systems, on Steam, Itch.io and on our Github Releases page. This will give any brave souls the chance to see where Naev was at various points in time. Be it for nostalgia’s sake or to see how things were 5 years ago.
Present day sees a lot of cool new things brewing in the development builds of Naev, but I’ll leave that for future Blarg posts :)
As always, feel free to join our Discord and say hi.
Happy Reading!
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Utility Outfits
BY BOBBENS, ON JUNE 6TH, 2021
This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.
Most non-weapon outfits in Naev have consisted of simple modifications, with some notable exceptions like afterburners. This has always meant that most of the game is built around setting up outfits, without non-weapon outfits playing an active role in combat. In order to allow much more flexible outfit design, we have incorporated Lua, the widely used scripting language in Naev and other projects, into the outfits.
The result? Now outfits can react to environmental conditions or trigger in certain instances. Furthermore, the behaviours don’t have to be fixed, but can be dynamically set during runtime. This allows doing simple things like having outfits give you bonuses above certain shield levels, or depending on nearby ships. Below are some examples of what can be done with this.
The Emergency Stasis Inducer will automatically trigger when your ship takes armour damage. Not only will it slow down time around you, it will also speed up your ship for a great bullet time effect!
The Emergency Stasis Inducer in action! Do you like holograms? Would you like to project a fully equipped model of your ship into space to distract your enemies while you blast them into smithereens? The revolutionary Combat Hologram Projector does just that!
The Combat Hologram Projector in action! Have you ever felt so angry that you wanted to slow down time and get a large bonus to damage while you damage yourself? Think no further, the Berserk Chip does just that, without making you turn green and rip out of your shirt!
The Berserk Chip in action! Of course, it would only be right to pay homage to the original Cloaking Device by implementing it in Naev. While active, nobody will see you, and you will be able to do what you please freely.
The Cloaking Device in action! Other than these showcased outfits, there are many more to explore, however, we leave that up to you to look forward to in-game!
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Fancy Jumping
BY BOBBENS, ON MAY 2ND, 2021
This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.
Given that the old jump animation was a bit bland, fading in and out from white, we decided to give it a new spin with GLSL shaders. Furthermore, it is now possible to use multiple different jump animations. Currently only two are used in-game, but this might be extended in the future.
A quicksilver jumping into a new system.
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Trails for EVERYTHING!
BY BOBBENS, ON APRIL 9TH, 2021
This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.
By moving to newer versions of OpenGL in version 0.8, we have modernized the rendering pipeline of Naev, however, we have not been making full use of that power. Well, at least not up until now. We are proud to present trails for ships and missiles! These are generated procedurally using GLSL shaders, and are capable of having complex animations. There are currently a total of 7 different trails depending on the ship and missile, ranging from cool to very cool.
A llama crossing paths with some other ships. A quicksilver crossing paths with the Za'lek. Ships can have special trails in the nebula.
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Naev LÖVE
BY , ON MARCH 14TH, 2021
This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.
.Disclaimer: the LÖVE project has nothing to do with Naev. We just thought their API was cool and decided to implement it.
As you may know, the Naev scripting engine is written in Lua. Since the original releases of Naev, the Lua ecosystem has seen an incredible growth, being using in notable games and software. One of these great frameworks is LÖVE, which is a 2D game API. While we haven’t rewritten Naev in LÖVE, what we have done is implement a subset of the LÖVE API in Naev. In combination with the dialogue systems we had already implemented in Naev, we were able to extend it such that LÖVE games could be launched inside of Naev using the Naev engine. Since a picture says a thousand words, let us see some examples taken from simplegametutorials.
Flowers demo running in Naev We can see the game is being run inside a dialogue window inside of Naev. Mouse input is passed and it reacts to user input.
Snake demo running in Naev An independent game loop can also be run inside of Naev, along with keyboard input to create a snake game.
Of course what game is complete without a Sokoban minigame?
Sokoban demo running in Naev Since Naev itself has asteroids, it seems like the next logical steps is to run an asteroids clone inside of Naev.
Asteroids demo running in Naev Although we haven’t shown any original mini-games. The LÖVE API has a nearly infinite potential for creation. In future posts we will show some of the different ways it is being used in Naev.