D.S.S. Fleet System
What I often find lacking in most strategy game is the presence of any sort of fleet management system. What I mean by that is a mechanism that allows the player to setup the unit’s positions within the fleet when they are in formation. Usually you would put ships with more defense up front and ships with a wider weapon range back. Also, if you have ships that buff/debuff other ships within some range, you would certainly want them to hold a specific position in the fleet.
I find it to play a very important role strategy-wise in my game. So I spent a lot of effort in making a fleet editor that would give the player full control while (hopefully) being easy to use.
Placing ships in three dimensions can be challenging but I think I found an elegant way to solve this. The player puts ships on a X-Y grid which he can move up and down the Z axis by ctrl+left click and dragging it. And there is a green cursor that shows how high the grid is from the origin.
So that’s it, hope you enjoyed my first video of D.S.S. 
Verrrrrry nice video!!
I love the colors – also the music (don’t know if its already ingame).
Maybe it would be nice to have the ships (which the user marked and then pressed on “fleet designer”) automatically in there, in a semi-random fashion so he would just need to drag and drop.
With a high chance it will be less hassle than to get each ship from the fleet on the left.
So I understand it there is not much left to do?
- “skysphere” dynamic
- nice story
- more enemies!
- more tech? / warpdrives and so on?
I was actually thinking of making a “create fleet” button that would setup a fleet with ships currently selected. Which is almost the same as your idea
I try not to force micro-management on the player. But that probably won’t be an optimal fleet configuration, it is up to the player to “optimize”.
There is still quite a lot to do though :/ Mostly AI and contents (ships component, tech, resources, etc). Also multiplayer mode is going to be a tough one.
Oh and please please make the next video with 720p also? Pls?
+1 for 720p, also looking like a really powerful formation editor!
This is looking amazing, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the blog
Speaking of fleet management system, what I always find lacking is creating a fleet. If you want to build a fleet you have to manually produce each and every vessel, tell it to go to a certain place and them, usually, merge them in one fleet. Would it be possible to not only define position of units within fleet but define fleet to be produced and then let computer optimize production schedule?
E.g. you want to standardize fleets to have one battleship, two cruisers, 4 destroyers and 5 frigates. instead of queing ships manually, computing which to produce where and when (presumably it takes less to build frigate than cruiser) you simply create template fleet, assign construction sites (planets, factories, starbases whatever) and computer tells you when your fleet will be ready.
Of course, you’d still need the original way in case of emergency, but that wouldn’t be too often.
The plan is once a fleet is created (from a template or a new one) and assigned a position, it will automatically fill empty spot with available ships in the star system. If there are not enough ships to fill all spots, they could be queued in the nearest factory.
That sounds excellent!
I like the conceptual idea of the fleet management, however what about larger support ships (in this case, carriers I guess?). In most games they generally are a rear-line ship, however do you have any intention of making them take/deal a hit? or just strictly support? I’m a bit of a Homeworld junkie so I love the ideas in this post