The Skype chat currently contains 18 people and although we haven’t got any big testing goings, I’m hoping to do that in a week or so.

The Physics System that Exuvo implemented back in December is working really well. We’ve implemented all projectiles into that system as well and it makes it really easy to implement custom movement and guided missiles.

Here are some examples of things that was extremely easy to make with this new system:

Here’s a picture of one of the three(!) new ships that we’ve implemented since Christmas. It’s a corvette and it’s a slower and more durable kind of ship compared to the quick and agile Wraith fighter. You can see an allied miner in front of it and an allied wraith to the right. The enemy ship with a green shield around it is an enemy corvette using its Reflective Shield ability. The Reflective Shield ability makes enemy projectiles bounce off harmlessly off the shield. This would be just about impossible to do with the standard movers but with our system, it’s a walk in the park(as long as you get the geometry working correctly). You can also see the Corvette firing a photon barrage of three projectiles in a cone in front. Making several projectiles launch in different angles with one single ability is a minute’s work at most.

Here’s the wraith showing off the EMP ability(The trail doesn’t show up properly in the picture but it looks better in-game). I want each ship to have at least one unique ability that fits its role. The Wraith has an EMP that it can launch in any direction. The EMP moves fast and will turn off the engine if it hits an enemy ship (Battlecruisers are immune). Turning off the engine of an enemy miner can be very deadly to the miner if the enemy isn’t very fast to react but even then it’ll have lost a lot of speed.

Here’s the fighter equipped with the counter-missile item(the item is consumed when used so that’s why it’s not in the inventory on the picture). The counter-missile item fires out a projectile that quickly splits into four counter-missiles in each direction. The four counter-missiles will home in on nearby enemy projectiles and destroy them. If there are no nearby enemy missiles they will keep on going outwards until their 5 second life runs out.

I also experimented with combining different models into a new ship. This is what I came up with:

As you might’ve noticed, we’ve done a lot of work on new ships. Don’t worry though, we’ve added several new upgrades, more AI features, fixed more bugs and added several additional features(for example the ability to deposit and withdraw items into a ship when it’s docked). I just wont talk about all of it right now(mostly because I forgot most of what we’ve done)

I will do a bigger write-up in a couple of days with new information and some screenshots. It should be nice.

I don’t know how interesting this is to read but I thought I’d mention what bugs we ran into. I’d also like to mention that I set up a google docs form where you can submit suggestions and bug reports. It can be found here.

Here are some of the bugs we found:

1. Leaving players keep their marine. This sucks if the leaving player is standing in an important console since it’s then inaccessible to everyone else.
2. Each time a player enters the missile console, the camera zooms out to space view for player 1.
3. The camera starts following the wrong battlecruiser sometimes. This was actually caused by 2.
4. The hangar seems to mess up a lot due to an unknown cause. It prevents you from launching miners because they’re supposedly out in space even though they’re not.

I fixed 2 which in return fixed 3. 1 is easy to fix and I’ll do it when I have time. I don’t know the cause of 4. but I added some better debug messages for it. If you try to launch a ship and it tells you it’s already launched it should give you more output and tell you to talk to me. The easiest way to do this would be to submit a bug report in the form I previously linked.

We Swedes celebrate most of Christmas on Christmas Eve so I’ll be busy with family and friends tomorrow and some time after.

Since I probably wont post another blog post in the coming week, I would like to take the opportunity to say: Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Thanks for supporting us and giving us suggestions, we really appreciate it

Christmas means some other things as well. I originally planned public release for this year. This has been pushed back to next year. However, beta will be out this year(quite soon actually). Now, I wasn’t originally planning on having an open beta test but I decided to do this anyway.

Why? I will have little time to test the stuff myself so my hope is to get a bunch of you to help me test it so development is faster. That’s what beta is for after all.

Now, to plan all this we’ll be using skype. We could use the in-game chat channels but who is actually going to have SC2 on all the time waiting for others.

Beta is going to start as soon as we can iron out some of the major known bugs we’ve found. When it starts, I’ll try to organize beta tests every know and then. The question you must be asking yourself is, how do I participate?

I took the opportunity to create a google form that you can find here

Just fill in your skype name and optionally your name and an introduction and then I’ll try to add you to the group chat on skype where I’ll organize the beta tests if everything goes according to plan.

When the beta starts, I’ll also post a bug report form where you can fill out bugs you find. You can also message me on Skype or thehelper with bugs.

In other related news, Exuvo implemented a custom physics system which made movement much more smooth and the battlecruiser can now push around asteroids and miners. I’ll try to get Exuvo to write a more detailed post about the physics system but we’re both busy with our school project which is more important(and equally awesome). Exuvo is doing a huge amount of work on both projects and if it weren’t for him, none of the projects would have any chance of completion.

I hope you choose to sign up for the beta. I don’t know how fun it’ll be compared to WC3 version. A lot of the stuff is implemented and it’s basically only missing the fighter vessel, the extra consoles and some of the upgrades.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to comment. I know it sounds silly but your comments really make my day and encourages me to keep working hard. I don’t actually know how many you are. The views per day has slowly declined the last month. I guess that’s because the updates have been slow. Still, I had 103 views one day in october. I wonder how many unique persons those were…

I’ve always loved creating things so the Starcraft 2 editor(and  the Warcraft 3 editor before that) has just been a natural step for me. Fortunately for me, I’ve been working with the editor since the beta and thing are making more and more sense to me every day I use it.

The problem for most people starting from scratch with the editor without any previous experience is that the scary data editor. It’s much more powerful in Starcraft 2 compared to Warcraft 3′s but this naturally makes it more complex.

To help new users overcome this, I spent some of my free time writing a lot about it. It resulted in a quite huge tutorial with one goal: When you’re done reading it, you should almost be at my level of experience.

Let me explain how it works: The entire thing revolves around a custom unit, Sam, and then we do stuff with him. Add abilities and so on. The tutorial is divided into sections. The first section is about creating Sam and his weapon from scratch. The second section is about abilities and we spend the section adding 4 abilities with increasing difficulty to Sam. The third section is about extra stuff where we talk about other things that we haven’t talked about yet.

However, I released it before it was completely finished because I wanted people to benefit from it as soon as possible and it’s going to take a lot of time finishing it. The first section is done and the second section is 25% done. It’s almost 7,000 words in total and it’s not even half-way done.

If you feel like you have an idea for a custom map that you want to make a reality, the time to start is now. There isn’t a lot of great custom maps on battle.net yet and the game is still fresh. The popularity system is discouraging but if you’re optimistic, Heart of the Swarm will be released within a year with more improvements to the custom map system in battle.net 2.0.

You can find my tutorial at thehelper.net here. There are also a lot of great tutorials over at SC2 Editor Tutorials. If you ever get stuck creating your map, don’t hesitate to bring your questions to the help forum at thehelper.net.

- Cruiser command status -

Now, how is Cruiser Command going? Why are there so few post recently? Well, I talked about it in my last post and it is still true. However, I do work on the map and I also recently got contact with our terrainer(time zones make it difficult) and he’s back on track with an almost functional computer.

Regarding the current development rate, I have to say that the public release is pushed back. The beta should be done this year no problem(It mostly relies on the terrain being done).

I’ve been working on the damage and it’s about done. Marines can black out and become incapacitated and they can also be revived by a revive kit. Huge piles of scrap sometimes appear at random parts in the ship when you take damage with your shields down.  Where they appear depends on what angle you take damage from. If you take damage from the front, the pile of scrap will be created in the front part of the ship(on either floor) and so on.

I was going to work on damage control as well but I need the ship to be divided into sections and that’ll have to wait until after the real terrain is about done. I think I’m going to work on the AI next. That’ll be fun.

I’ve wanted to wait until I had something to show you or talk about but unfortunately I still don’t.  I’ve been working mostly on the damage.

I want debris to appear in the ship if you take damage when the shields are down. The debris should be removable by a repair kit that should be available for purchase in the construction console.

This is slightly done. The debris exists but it currently doesn’t spawn when you take damage so you will never see it. The repair kits exists and so does the repair ability that is used when you use the repair kit. However, due to a bug in the editor, I can’t really get the item to work like I want it to. When you use an Area-of-effect ability, most abilities switch your cursor for a different one that shows the radius of the ability.

It looks something like this:

However, I can get that to show for a normal ability but I cant get it to show for an ability that you cast through an item. This is a bug that was supposed to be fixed in the 1.4 patch, but it doesn’t seem like it actually got fixed.

So, I obviously want the AoE cursor to show when you target with the item so the best workaround I can think of is: When you get a repair kit in your inventory, a new repair ability shows up on the marine. This way, the ability is still cast from the marine, but you cant use the ability if you don’t have an item.

If anyone got better ideas, let me know.

Now, this is not a great amount of work. Development has just been slower lately. Why? Well, exuvo had 3 exams this weeks as well as some last week. I had less but still a bunch. Also, since our vacation is over, work is naturally going to go slower. I also have the problem that it feels like I have barely anything to do. If you look at my status report post, you’ll see the things I have to do for beta release. The only real things that are left are some new missiles and upgrades as well as some systems like the A.I drones.

I added 7 missiles at once when I made them. This is the same amount as in WC3 so it’ll do for now. I only have a couple of upgrades at the moment: One that enables the mining scanner one that improves the refining rate. If you played the original WC3 version or if you have ideas on your own, feel free to comment on upgrades I should make.

The last reason I haven’t worked too much on Cruiser command lately is simple. Skyrim. There’s so much to do and it’s really sucking my time away. I’ll try to restrict myself in the future

My plan was for all basic mechanics and systems to work so we could play a full game. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

It was a little hard to get people interested in testing it since we knew it wouldn’t be fun(yet), but people were willing to help because they know how awesome it will be when it’s done.

The first game started out normal… for about 5 seconds. Then everyone died. Literally.

Turns out the alliance settings were messed up and people on the battlecruisers ended up as enemies and killed each other. This is mostly due to the Starcraft 2 lobby system not being the same as in Warcraft 3. The player’s number just means in what order he joined not what place in the list he is. So when the first player joins, he will be player 1 even if he changes to slot 10.

This was a pretty easy fix though so we could do more testing. There were a lot of small things that are hard for me to find when I test it alone.

Here’s a list of some bugs we found:

* Some consoles were inaccessible on the second battlecruiser
* Some dialogs worked for team 1 but not team 2.
* The hangar dialog gets broken if you open up the purchase menu but then close down the hangar.

We also noticed that team 2′s conveyor belt(used for refining) was twice as fast as player 1′s. Upon further investigation, it turns out you could sneak in to the conveyor belt and be dragged into refining by the conveyor belt, killing you in the process. This only happened for team 2 though. It turns out team 2′s conveyor belt started transporting one of the invisible pathing blockers that was meant to keep player’s out.

(A marine about to get refined)

We also had a number of ridiculous bugs related to resources. Since in our version, the amount of minerals you have are shown in the top right instead of minerals, gas and supply, we have to make sure each player in the team has the same amount of resources.

To do this, we just go through each player in the team every time a player purchases something and set their minerals to the same as the person who purchased something. However, if you have a player who has left the game, his resources are automatically distributed to the team. So when my friend was alone on his team and tried to purchase something, it gave all the other persons who left the same amount of money but that money was then given back to him since they had left. Because of this, he got a ton of money every time he bought something.

Because of the same system, we also found another bug. If one person sends all his resources to another person, and then the one who got the money buys something, the first person will get all the money back because of how the system works. We will fix this by just disabling sending resources.

Also, there was of course some problems with missiles. The missiles is probably the thing I’ve spent the most time trying to fix. Those movers hate me…

There are still some bugs I haven’t been able to fix, some because I haven’t had the time and some because I haven’t been able to replicate them.

During the LAN, I also had some time to start working on damage. Damage needs several things. There should be piles of debris and explosions spawning when the ship gets attacked and it should be removable with repair kits that you can purchase. The repair kits work although in their first version you had to target a pile and the marine would walk up to it, destroy the debris, himself and any nearby console or missile bay door.

Overall, I think the testing was a success. I look forward to progressing further.

As some of you might’ve heard by now, alpha is going to be out next week. We’re planning to have our first test on Monday. That gives me 3 more days to fix the remaining stuff.

Me and Exuvo have really been stepping it up a notch this week and we’ve got a ton of stuff implemented.

We were going to have the construction and storage in unit’s command card like in Warcraft 3 with abilities and such because that’s way easier, but as I was fixing it yesterday I decided to make the storage in dialogs. It turned out very well in my opinion and the storage integrates nicely with the shop.

Today I worked on the refining and it went pretty well. It’s about done for alpha now(although it still needs work later on. Right now you get a 1:1 refining ratio)

Our goal with the alpha is to get a system where you can kill the enemy battlecruiser from SCRATCH. That means you jump into a miner, mine minerals, return them to the ship, bring them to the refinery and refine them, construct missiles, withdraw missiles from storage, load missiles, fire missiles on enemy battlecruiser until it dies. The end.

This involves a lot of different systems and such, most of which are complete. I was going to try the process out since I thought I could at least come all the way to loading the missiles, however I ran into some problem when mining.

Originally, the miner worked like a normal unit. You tell it to go somewhere, it goes there and then it stops. Now when things are getting done, we added it to the same navigation system that is used for the battlecruiser. Basically what this does it that it makes the ship constantly move forward in the direction it’s facing.

Doing this, the abilities no longer works. The reason for this(I’ll try not to get too much into the technical details) is that you actually don’t have the battlecruiser selected when you drive it. You have a navigator. So now that I’m flying the miner, I have the navigator selected, not the miner. The navigator has no abilities. I need to give the navigator dummy abilities and when those abilities are used, I’ll tell the miner to use the correct ability.

So that’s one thing I have to fix. The only other thing I can think of right now that needs fixing is the weapon system. The broadside attack apparently stopped working and the missiles are still a little bugged. The small target laser does not exist yet so I’ll have to add that as well.

Now, as I mentioned before, alpha needs to be done in 3 days and to make things harder, Exuvo is going to be gone for 3 days on a convention. This means it’s on me to finish this last bit. Fortunately, I have no school for 10 days so I should have the time to do this.

Wish me luck! Also, if you want to participate in the closed alpha. Give me contact details below or PM the contact details to me on Thehelper.net. My username is Siretu. The testing will be done on the European servers.

I am not going to make the alpha public since you would only complain about lack of features and all the bugs. I want to give you something nice that is actually fun to play. Depending on how much stuff I can stuff into the beta, it might get released then.

I at least want the good terrain in the game before I release it.

Also, since I will focus a lot on getting the alpha out, I most likely wont be able to write a new post for at least a week or so. When I do however, it will most likely be a new status report describing how the alpha went. However, I will still read all comments and try to reply to them. I will also try to update the current status from time to time with the alpha progress.

I wont give out the map for translation/publishing until the public release though.

Anyway, Ethern wanted to know when I was going to release the map. I know I usually hint about the current status in my posts but I thought I should post the mail I sent to Ethern here so you can get a good sense of our current plan for Cruiser command.

So here it is:

The map is nearing alpha stage and I hope it will be ready for alpha in a week or so.

As I currently see it, there’s 4 stages.

1. Alpha
2. Beta
3. Public release
4. Content additions

The alpha will just contain a BARELY playable map. It will have energy management, mining, some basic combat and such. The terrain will probably not be done by our terrain guy in a week so there will be temporary terrain that will be ugly. I wont give it to you in this stage, you would be disappointed. This is the first point where I start to do multiplayer testing. This phase starts in a little over a week.

The beta will have a lot more additions. The terrain should be done or at least be done without the polishing. The beta will introduce mostly new content such as new terrain(as I mentioned), new missiles and upgrades and such as well as maybe some other feature like Artificial Intelligence(Drones). The map will still be rough and, I assume, littered with bugs that will need fixing. I wont give it to you in this stage, mostly because it is close to something that could be publicly accepted and I’d rather wait until it is. I have no estimated time for this phase.

The public release is where the awesome starts. Bugs will be mostly ironed out and the game will start to become fun to play. The damage system will be improved so you take damage in the right sections and so and there will be more effects from taking damage. Most if not all upgrades and missiles will be in the game at this point. This is where I give you the map. The map will be ready for you to translate and later on upload to the Chinese servers. This is estimated by the end of the year.

Content additions come later on and are basically patches with more awesome stuff. This is where I’ll add the drones, or if they’re already added I’ll invest more time into them and improve them. We will add boarding and damage control and possibly other stuff as well. Of course there will be the smaller stuff as well such as bug fixes and maybe additions with more missiles and upgrades. I will also think about adding some way to progress and keep your progression between games. Probably something that wont affect gameplay in a huge way or at all.

This doesn’t mean I’m not working on the map. I am trying to get it ready for alpha in two weeks and that means I have to fix a lot of small stuff behind the scenes. This involves:

• Making sure consoles work properly
• Fixing teleporters
• Making sure all the ship systems work for both teams and all players
• Fixing the start-up so every active player gets marines that are stored for later use as well as other start-up thingies.

There are some work of that nature left to do but I’ve done a big part of it already.

I still have to do the energy management which is barely started. Missiles are still not guided but I am probably not going to fix that for the alpha release.

Talking about combat, there’s something I would like an opinion on. Consider these two consoles: Navigation console(Navigates the battlecruiser), Weapons console(handles weapons)

Now, in the Warcraft 3 version, the weapons console had a fast firing laser attack but the missiles were fired by the captain in the navigation console.

In our version, we got missiles, the fast laser weapon as well as a broad side attack which is basically a powerful attack that comes out from one of the sides shooting straight out(Like a medieval ship’s cannons)

How should we divide these over the two consoles? We could every type of weaponry to the damage console but then navigation would only have to navigate the battlecruiser as well as use some abilities like motor boost and fast turning.

Our current plan is probably to have the powerful broad side attack in the navigation console and give missiles and the fast laser attack to the weapons console. Does this sound like a good idea?

In other news, I also did some changes on the blog. You might’ve noticed the extra stuff on the sidebar to the right. Many times when I am working on Cruiser command, I feel like it would be nice to update you on what I’m doing but I don’t think it deserves an entire new blog post. In these cases I’ll update the “Current status”.

I also added an easy way to follow my blog. Since my updates are not that frequent, following me might be a good idea so you don’t have to check this site all the time(although that’s also nice and you might want to do that if you want to get the latest status from the “Current status”.

Finally, I also added an “Affiliates” tab. This is because I got an offer to become an affiliate with Starcraft editor tutorials(or SET for short) which is a sub-site for thehelper.net. It really is a great honor since thehelper.net is an awesome site. SET is a very good way to get into mapping. It contains a good amount of very helpful tutorials, some written by myself. If you feel like creating Starcraft 2 custom maps you should definitely check it out.