Travis Day, Dogfight Producer

Greetings Citizens!

Thank you all for tuning in for another Friday Arena Commander update! As always the team here in Santa Monica has been hard at work wrapping up all the gameplay features and systems work for our first release of Arena Commander to everyone. We’re putting the last few major components to bed and should have something we’re confident in sharing soon™.

Speaking of systems work, Paul Reindell our Lead Engineer has been putting the finishing touches on the power system for our spaceships which just wrapped up this week. Paul has put together a properly balanced power generation and drawing system with configurable priorities for different systems. Meaning that if you are drawing large amounts of power on your weapons (pew pew), depending on the settings/priorities that you have put in place, it will either maximize your firepower while drawing down the power being deployed to the shields and thrusters or reduce your fire rate and power to maintain the maximum efficiency for thrusters and shields.

It sounds fairly standard but as with everything that we do the detail is what makes the system really shine. Not only can you apply broad stroke allocations like thrusters over weapons or vice versa but you can also assign priority with that. So if for example you experience a power shortage to your weapons you can have set priorities for power to the different individual weapons that you value most to keep them firing until the last drop of energy is consumed. This approach allows more casual players to make sweeping adjustments quite quickly while allowing for players to get as detailed as they want to on micromanaging every last aspect.

As everyone knows though… With great power, comes great… Improvements to the shield system! So not only did Paul finish off the power allocation and flow system, he’s also adjusted the shield system. Part of this was necessitated to insure the shield maintained its full functionality with the finalized power system but it has also improved the granularity of control that players will have over their shields via the HUD both in the shield management tab as well as the knock on effects of decisions they make in power management. It also helps to lay the ground work for having ships with multiple shield generators drawing from multiple or single power plants and battery systems.

Power and Shields are not the only systems that got closed off this week however. The IFCS has become much more configurable for the player so they can determine how “hands on” they want it to be. One of the major additions in this week alone was introducing the ability to configure how the ship’s IFCS handles turns.

Generally in the Arena Commander (and later SC/SQ42) as you “turn” the IFCS is not only firing thrusters to orient your ship rotationally to its new desired orientation. The IFCS is also using the thrusters to arrest your velocity on your old vector align your angular velocity to your new goal orientation and keep those in sync to maintain symmetry between orientation and velocity. As you can imagine, if your main engine is at full throttle your maneuvering thrusters have to expend a lot of energy adjusting angular velocity and this can cause you to turn slower the higher your primary engine is thrusting. We decided to adjust this mode so that the IFCS would no longer limit the rate of your rotation but instead reduce your throttle so that you could maintain maximum rotation performance. This has created a much more responsive and fun experience with the IFCS fully enabled. We’ve felt like this is driving in a car with traction control enabled as the IFCS will always prevent your ship from rotating faster than your angular velocity can change, basically keeping the backend from sliding out, to further the car analogy.

Well we’ve now introduced an intermediate step where you can fly with “traction control” turned off. This allows you to change the orientation of your ship without the IFCS dampening rotation to stay in lock step with your ships velocity vector. At higher rates of speed it means you can really get these two out of alignment if you’re not careful but it also makes for some really awesome slaloming through asteroid belts and, for lack of a better term, drifting through turns.

What good would all this power and maneuverability be without some beautiful weapon effects to back it all up though? This week has seen a lot of final polish and finishing touches going into each of the weapon and damage effects. Both Casey and Forrest have been revisiting all the effects and meeting with Chris to review and revise the particulars of each effect to meet his standards. The results have been quite stunning as we’re using some very complicated layered visual effects like you would see in a major motion picture at runtime. The effects are starting to take on more of the look of a summer blockbuster than a video game. The lighting for each of the ships and effects have also gotten their final passes following the finishing of the PBR integration and conversion work that has been ongoing.

We’re all really excited as we watch this game coming together and cannot wait to share it with as soon as humanly possible. There are still a great many breaking issues left to resolve but we are getting closer to having it each and every week. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading what we’ve been up to this week in Santa Monica. As always, if you have any questions please post them to our ‘Ask a Dev’ threads!

Thank you for your continued support!

Cloud Imperium Games Santa Monica