Tuesday, June 23, 2009

A New Look


With the advent of ICS3, we have made a considerable amount of changes to both the ships and to their all important huds. The ships now keep track of fuel and ammunition, however the huds have changed as well.

Both the pilot and copilot are now able to control their own camera, as well as start and stop the ship. Also, using the blue button, the hovertext for a ship can be enabled and disabled.
finally, weapon arming has been reduced to a single button, and guns have to cycle through positions rather than going straight to a specific point like our older monitor type ironclads.

Changes have also been made to speed and turning. Speed is now measured in knots (as close as we could get to them in SL) and every ship has a maximum speed they can reach. This means that ships can now stay in formation a bit better because the speeds are now standardized. Turning is now a bit more responsive, and a third degree of turning was added as well. This means your ships can make tighter turns now.

Overall the hud and ships should be more responsive, due to optimization in the scripting that is used. The huds new standardized and modular design means it will be much easier for us to make them and much easier for pilots to operate them.

Monday, June 22, 2009

SNS and INS updated

The SNS and INS ships have now been fully updated to ICS3.0. Now that we have everything worked out the rest of the ships will come quickly. We are going to update the MSS ships next, followed by the historical USS/CSS models. We will not however be releasing any submarines during these updates. Those still need to be rescripted but these will come shortly after the rest as most of the scripting is done for these already. Below is our current roadmap...

1. Update MSS series ships

2. Update USS/CSS series ships.

3. Update and implement submarines

4. I want to balance out the mortars. Currently they are a bit overpowered and tend to dominate any match. I plan to reduce their range and accuracy. This will require some testing.

5. If the MMCS combat system proves to be worthy of our infantry battles, we may implement the scripts into ICS rounds so that way ships can fire on infantry.

6. After all that, we will most likely stop making ships for awhile and work on other ICS projects, such as flak guns for anti-aircraft roles, destructible buildings, floating repair/refuel stations, underwater mines etc etc. We also may start on land and air vehicles.