Goodbye Header

The earth is turning, the universe is expanding. And so far, my cinema skills are growing (backwards sometimes...). The ships of Echo are currently at a redesigning process - and so the header are changing now.

So say sayonara to the old header images, R.I.P. and we see us in hell (unless you don't clear your cache)

Lightstage Poll

With new graphics, and new light-setups there are a few questions. Vote your favourite design. But remember: This are no real time models, so we need a comparative neutral setup.

News has arrived

We don't spend all the time at echo, but theres a few news from us:


ck works now on a collision-model, the first music track is created, new ship-types like a tender and frigates are currently at work and we have a basic-web interface for the online analytics.

We also rejected some concept ideas like real-time-models for this now. The solution is that every model becomes different light stage setups for each space sector setting.
Thats it folks, keep on reading!

179° turn

In the beginning, we were looking forward to realize the following system: The player looks at the (unscrollable) viewport and all ship activities are shown within it. But question after question was raised, how this system is going to work - or not, what speed the ships should have, how fast they can turn and so on. ck is unremitting in querying all concepts - trust me.

Therefore, we are going to develop a new and better system. The Viewport is now a normal view at the fleet, including effects (explosions, laser, shields and more). Beyond that, the player has a radar which shows exactly all fleet actions as specific pictograms. The game field isn't fixed anymore, in the new system you can scroll it. We hope the player can still control all his ships without killing himself in case of lost overview.

The pictures only show modified screenshots, though we are working on making them real, be patient.

making a concept...AI!

So, now i am constructing the AI for the game, so, what is to do? First, the AI can "see" the ships by calling someship->position();, and the own ships may be moved per "shipnumber command option", for exampe "001 N 000" to navigate the first ship to 0 degree. So the AI only has the same options as a human player, but it is faster!

So, how to make a strong AI? The AI-Ships have to kill the enemyships, hoho! What would I do? I would navigate the ships to several positions to attack the enemy by all sides, may be good, but the AI has to defend their own ships, too :S. Ah, it doesn't have to navigate _ALL_ ships to the enemy, if it has to defend something like a huge, heavy ship. So now it would be in the right position to attack, now should all ships attack one enemyship, or one enemyship for one AI-ship? Hm, I will have to invest more time in it..!

Ship physics

I implemented most of the ship's basic movement physics the other day. We have so-called definition files which specify the physical quantities of a given ship type, such as its mass, its size, its shape, the force of its engines and the torque the maneuvering jets apply for rotating a ship. Furthermore, we also specify the ship's maximum velocity and angular velocity. There is no physical law in classical mechanics which would limit the ships' velocity, but it we don't want them to travel too fast as a game element.

The goal now was to find a way to compute the ship's acceleration based on the forces without getting significantly faster than the specified maximum velocity. In other words, we need to modify Newton's law to take into account the maximum velocity of the ship. I spent some thought on how to modify this so that it has the properties we'd like, and this is what I came up with: In this formula, the minus sign is used if the dot product of F and v is positive, and the plus sign otherwise. In the case that the force goes into the same direction as the current velocity, the additional term will lower the total acceleration by a factor of v/vmax. Therefore, when v reached vmax, a will be zero and no additional acceleration is possible anymore. Also, when, for whatever reason, the ship gained a higher velocity than vmax, then the additional term slows it down again.

On the other side, if F points into the opposite direction of v, then we are actually deccelerating. The dot product is less than zero, so the plus sign is used. In this case, the original acceleration is increased by a factor of v/vmax. This makes decceleration from high velocities take shorter than accelerating to such a velocity. This might not be realistic, but it makes it easier to avoid collisions, so I think it's a good thing. If we didn't want this, then we could simply drop the additional term when deccelerating, and we would still have the velocity limit in place.

Another thing to note is that if the ship is travelling at maximum velocity, then changes its direction arout 90 degrees and accelerates into a direction which is perpendicular to the current one, then the dot product is zero and the second term vanishes. In that case, we allow the total velocity to become greater than vmax. This is not a problem though, because of three reasons:

1) As explained before, the ship will automatically slow down again when travelling faster than vmax.
2) To permanently travel faster than vmax, one would need to change the flight direction very often, taking a zigzag-like route. In that case however, one would be faster when travelling at vmax using the direct route anyway.
3) The effect is very small: If vmax is 20, and one turns at v=19.99, then the highest v will be v=20.05 before it gets smaller again.

For rotation, the same formula is used, with the force replaced by the torque (also specified in the definition file), the acceleration replaced by the angular acceleration, the mass replaced by the moment of inertia and the (maximum) velocity by the (maximum) angular velocity. As there is only one direction for rotation (namely around the Z axis) we don't even have the possibility of gaining more angular velocity than the maximum here.

making a concept...a dark hole?

Now Echo gets in a hot phase. I spend many hours to consider some equitable principles of flight physics, interfaces and ship interacting. Todays topic is the ship Interface/Effects on the battlefield (sector).


The main problem is the overview about the sector with much interfaces/detailed ship info. So we'll found some shortkeys and other hacks to solve this tricky problems. Also we need to find some solution to make the departed flight routes of a ship visible. Currently we have the dots, but it isn't nice. Maybe we make some engine exhausts, contrails or somethin like this. We'll see.

On the picture you see such a concept.