Skyward Flight FM interviews Dan about Absolute Territory
This month I was fortunate enough to be asked to take part in an interview covering Absolute Territory, and a bit about Digitum Software (that’s me!).
Check it out, over on Skyward Flight Media.
The last several months have been difficult for people all around the world. I pray this announcement finds you in good health and in improving circumstances.
I have been very fortunate to be still employed and also working (not at home) throughout this crisis. I had several weeks off before the lockdown came into effect and by the end of that time, I was relieved to get back into work (even though I spent the whole of that time working on Absolute Territory). I think that must come down to not managing my time better and neglecting other areas in my life while I single-mindedly continued to work on Absolute Territory (and still do on my downtime ːlunar2019crylaughingpigː).
Release date expectations
The good news, I am aiming for a release date for Absolute Territory towards the end of 2020!
Campaign
Over the last few months, I have been working on the Absolute Territory campaign missions. Everyone one of these missions has been handcrafted within the in-game level editor which you can also use to create your own personalized missions and upload to share with the rest of the Absolute Territory community on Steam. The process is quick, taking a couple of clicks to upload and share.
The campaign story is around a faction of the Endophora (your opponent during this campaign), named The Order of Linnaeus, who has invaded Imperial space and laid claim to Bold Peace. You will find yourself going against Order forces, driving them back out of the sector. Each campaign mission in Absolute Territory brings unique experiences.
Absolute Territory has a full flight roster of eleven fighters across Imperial and Endophora . Five of which have a full 3D cockpit.
Options on the go
Graphical and audio options have been made available during the missions. Simply press Escape (or start button on your controller), drop into the options menu, configure to your liking, then exit out and test your changes reflected in the game instantly.
Warships
No space combat game is complete without having huge warships to either protect or destroy. Absolute Territory brings three huge warships into the conflict. Two destroyers (one for Imperial and Endophoria) and an Endophoria Cruiser, that’s in addition to the transport ship already available.
Situational awareness improvements
To enhance your situational awareness a small but very useful change is to include the name and distance to your target on the offscreen arrow indicator. Cycle through all your targets and know exactly what you’re targeting, even when they are not directly in front of you.
Tutorial Controller Glyphs
The tutorial missions in Absolute Territory introduce fundamental concepts of flying and fighting. Controller Glyph’s already cover keyboard & mouse and Xbox controllers to ease learning controls. This has now been expanded to include glyphs for PlayStation 4 controllers.
Performance Improvements
Minefields were costing twice as much CPU usage as Asteroid fields, after some investigation I was able to reduce this cost and it’s now on a similar level of performance.
Absolute Territory AI gains more improvements to help reduce the number of incidents where they find themselves stuck against Warships. It does happen much less, but I’ll admit it can still happen. I’ll be looking at ways to ensure that they can recover themselves.
been many other performance improvements in scripting, mostly to due with displaying text on the screen, towards reducing CPU cost and garbage generation for a smoother experience.
Demo & Wishlist
A demo for Absolute Territory will be made available during the Steam Game Festival. It’s already packaged, uploaded and ready to be downloaded when the festival goes lives at 10am Pacific time on June 9th, 2020.
Finally, head on over to the Steam store page, scroll down and hit that wishlist button! Every wishlist helps towards showing Steam that this is a game worthy of the algorithm’s attention.
Welcome pilot!
It has been another busy month where I had the unique opportunity to work on Absolute Territory for the past month on a full-time basis. During that time I ran a closed beta, squatted many reported bugs, added beta tester feedback, making many more improvements.
Some of the new features covered in this month’s dev diary include:
Watch the video or read on below:
Tutorials
Work has begun to include tutorials covering the different aspects of piloting your space combat fighter. They make use of a couple of new features added towards helping the player learn the controls. These tutorials are entirely scripted using the in-game level editor, and something the player could re-create themselves.
Transmissions
There was no way to convey the complex information needed to best instruct the player to pilot their ship. Transmissions have been added to solve this problem. Transmission sources can come from disembodied or embodied NPC’s. If the source is from an embodied NPC you will be able to see who is talking to you via the white bracket around the transmission source.
Help Glyphs
To further guide the player, help glyphs can be displayed to show relevant and appropriate controls on the HUD. These are context-sensitive and show help glyph for the currently used controller (if supported) with the correct keybinding (including user-defined). Currently, Help Glyph’s support keyboard, mouse and the Xbox 360 gamepad. Do you have a favorite controller not mentioned, post it in the comments below, as I look to expand on controller support.
Steam Workshop
From the conception of the level editor, one of the development goals was to have the ability to share missions with other players. With the majority of the features locked down and implemented, I was able to redirect development time into this area. From within the level editor, you can now submit your custom missions to the Steam Workshop using the publish form.
Fill in the title and description form your workshop item and hit submit. The level editor will then publish your workshop item with all the relevant files needed for other players to subscribe and play. You can make any last-minute alterations from within the Steam Community Workshop page itself.
Do you want to update your mission? Just load up the relevant mission, enter its Workshop ID and submit, your changes will automatically update your Workshop Item.
Have any feedback or suggestions or questions regarding this month’s dev update? Post them below.
Greetings Pilots!
Welcome along to the Absolute Territory Developer Diary for the month of December 2019. The last month has brought in new post-processing visual effects, music, and more level editor improvements for more flexibility and provide easier use.
Read the Full Diary over on IndieDB.com
Welcome along to the Absolute Territory Developer Diary for the month of December 2019. The last month has continued to bring more challenges as I work towards a release date. The road may be long but I can see whats on the horizon for that all important 1.0 release.
Welcome along to the November 2019 Dev Diary for Absolute Territory. In this developer diary I demonstrate the full power of this fully armed and operational— level editor! Most work for the last few months have gone into Conditional Actions allowing the player to create unique and exciting missions in an easy to learn environment.
You can read below for a summary of whats on offer or jump straight to the dev video where I show you how to create your own custom mission.
If you want to read up more on what the level editor has to offer, you can do so on this steam announcement post.
Greetings pilots!
This month has flown by, in part due to a well needed holiday. Now that I’m back, I’ve been continuing work on the Level Editor towards allowing you to create your own missions with a greater range of variety.
Here’s the run down on what’s discussed:
Absolute Territory is available to wishlist on Steam.
Here is the rundown for this September 2019 developer diary for Absolute Territory:
Absolute Territory is available to wishlist on Steam.
Welcome along to the Absolute Territory Alpha 4 Demo. This game is in active development and not representative of the final product.
Before you play I highly recommend you view the readme.txt within the download archive. The game can be played with keyboard & mouse/joystick/HOTAS/gamepad. You should review the keybindings within the Controls menu and adjust to your liking. You may need to define your own control bindings depending on the controller you will be using.
In this demo you can play through the first mission of the waves game mode, with a highscore table. You can also challenge yourself by creating your own custom missions, with a limited selection of opponents and features that will be available within the final game.
If you enjoyed the game, head on over to the Absolute Territory Steam page and wishlist.
DOWNLOAD ABSOLUTE TERRITORY ALPHA HERE
Have fun!
Patch Notes
4.2 (20190828)
4.1 (20190828)
4.0 (20190822)
Hello pilots!
I am happy to announce that Absolute Territory now has presence on Steam. The page is live and ready for eager pilots to register their interest by wishlisting. Wishlist away!
This is also the first time I’ve been able to lock down and commit to Absolute Territory features. These are the minimum expected features to appear in the game. I am not to keen to talk about what I’d like to see added at this time, I’d rather state what is there or what will be there in upcoming updates to Absolute Territory.
Challenge your piloting skills by creating your own missions. Develop unique scenarios envisioned from your imagination. You decide the difficulty by adjusting the environment and opponents. Fight with the most devastating weapons against lighter opponents or truly test your skills against-all-odds.
1st and 3rd person space combat action.
Don’t forget to head on over to the Absolute Territory Steam page and hit that wishlist button!
This months dev diary covers asteroid fields and a proof of concept for a mission creator for players to create their own custom missions. This was originally posted over on Itci.io.
Asteroid Fields
One feature I’ve always wanted to implement: asteroid fields. Vast fields of rocks that can span across huge distances.
The problem: performance degradation from updating a large number of bodies.
The solution: use a smaller number of bodies, local to the player position, which are updated and displayed when in defined asteroid field areas. Perform updates using the Unity Job System for improved performance.
The first videos show the result of an infinite asteroid field. A clipping distance is used, hence asteroids will pop in and out of view at the boundary.
How it works: asteroids are initially spawned around the players local position as far as the defined viewing clipping radius. Each asteroid is checked to determine if it falls within a defined asteroid field area. If it is, then show it, otherwise we hide it from view. We then move each asteroid based on the players velocity. When an asteroid goes past the boundary of the clipping area we re-spawn at another random position at the boundary edge.
This works well and performance is improved using the Job System over a single threaded process. These asteroid fields demos were run within the Unity editor so performance would be improved in the build without the editor overhead. One problem I will have is figuring out a balance for lower end systems as access to such a system is currently out of picture right now. I will be using Unity Analytics to help, once a playable build is made available, I will be able to compare performance across a range of systems as players engage with the game.
Currently, on my dev build performance starts to drop when 7500 bodies are visible. This was not the huge performance boost I was expecting using the Job System, so I may have to also experiment with the Entity Component System.
The asteroid field is not finished, I’d like to add further improvements to the aesthetic and also make them feel more dangerous than they currently are. In the version two video, below, there are now asteroid debris and dust clouds.
Flying through an infinite asteroid field with dust clouds and debris gave me a sense of claustrophobia that I had never had before. I just wanted to get out yet there was no end…
Mission Editor
Have you ever wanted to create you own missions and test the limit of your combat skills by creating your own adversities to over come? Or is it just me? Below is a short video showing a proof of concept on this idea. Simply click and place enemies to fight inside an area, click launch and go to battle.
It’s pretty simple, the only rule set currently is to destroy all enemies within the area. I’d like to expand this so the player can create simple sets of rules for spawning additional enemies along with other success and failure conditions, and configure ship loadouts.
You can updates showing the development of Absolute Territory @ https://twitter.com/abs_territory
