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...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.

Beginnings

So let's see where this takes us. There is not much to see yet, except for the beginnings of a framework for the ingame GUI. But I prefer to do some more work at the beginning instead of hacking something together which will reveal several drawbacks later.

The picture shows early concept art how the game might look like. It might turn out to look entirely different, though. Stay tuned!