One Million Worlds is officially released (as early access) and available to buy on steam. Because its early access the updates will come thick and fast but this is a major milestone towards finishing the game!
So, the games out, now to thoughts of Major Update 1 (no not a rest). This comes out of my research of open world games (read; playing games) where you can feel a little lost in the early game; not quite sure what you’re supposed to do. The One Million Worlds intro was built in response to that but it doesn’t go far enough so the first major update will be the Story Lines Update, this will be an (optional) guided path through the game taking you around the world and presenting you with challenges unique to the game.
Building that is going to be interesting as it will mesh a procedurally generated world with predefined story line elements. This means that the elements of the story line will appear in different contexts each play through; being familiar, but not quite the same. Should be fun.
Its not actually available to buy and download from Steam yet, and won’t be until the game comes out in alpha. But you can wishlist the game there so you’ll be informed as soon as its own.
This is a feature I’ve added based on some feedback from my friend Vincent, he was trying to create a floating city with a transport system and the existing rails didn’t really cut it since the rails going up to the floating city make it look like its not floating.
So: hover rails (or railless rails), these behave like a regular rail system exect you tell it what the waypoints are rather than it following real physical rails. So you can go up to the floating city on a predefined route without creating an eyesore
The UI for creating waypoints works but I think I need a more intuitive way to place waypoints, I’m thinking the way building are placed in real time strategy games might work, so you move a ghost version of the machine to the place where it will travel to and then click to place the waypoint
The previous Ai controlled ship; the trade ships, were large and neutral by default. I wanted to add something more like a fighter; small, nimble, forward firing and hostile by default.
Here’s the work in progress:
This ship is attacking an imaginary object just above the tower. I’m imagining a few of these surrounding a base and attacking intruders (as hostile ships them wandering around in the world might be a little player hostile, maybe for a hardcore mode).
I don’t think this ship body will be its final form as I wanted it to be more… like a spear. It will also probably attack things that aren’t in its imagination.
As a computer controlled ship this is all good but it immediately made me want to create something human controlled with equal maneuverability to fight it but the command chair as is stands requires far to much external wiring to process the outputs before they go to the engines. So; I’m planning on allowing simple formulas to be put in the keybindings for the command chair as well as vectors
So the current command chair allows you to select a single key to output in each direction, so for example you might type “a” to bind the a key to the SOUTH output which means to get forwards, fire, up, down, left, right you need 6 outputs, which already means you need 2 layers of outputs which is fine for a capital ship but big for a fighter. But if instead you allow simple formulas you can have:
SOUTH = a-d (controlling left and right together, press a and SOUTH is +1, press d and its is -1, press both and achieve nothing, don’t do that)
EAST = w (for forwards)
WEST = o-l (for up and down)
NORTH = x (for fire)
Great, now were’re at a single layer of outputs, except we’ve got wires coming forwards from the cockpit, that’s going to obscure our view, and the game already supports vectors so how about this:
SOUTH = w, a-d, o-l
EAST = x (for fire)
Now we can get all the signals away from the player nice and easily!
So that’s the plan, if all goes well you should see us in a fighter battle with that sunspear soon
