Propulsion Hardware & The Road Ahead

With the internal propulsion hardware complete, I've FINALLY ticked off the last to-do item on the first official (also, as it were, internal) version of the new Black Road Sky. I'm fucking stoked.

There's not enough game here to warrant a public release, but check out the tentative roadmap at the end of this post to get an idea of where we stand in the bigger picture.

Refueling, Coms & Utility Dock

An initial refueling implementation is in place, and I don't expect it to change much as development continues. Instead of docking internally, walking through the station to a terminal, and pushing the magic instantaneous refuel button, there is now an actual refueling procedure!

Refueling requires a connection to the new utility dock located on the nose of the ship. This will eventually be achieved either by docking externally, or by manually connecting a pump mechanism from the station if docked internally. Refueling requests are made from the cockpit via the newly (& very sparsely) implemented Coms System. This will probably be some sort computer terminal accessible from the pilot seat. Once fuel is flowing from the station to the ship, there's a refuel valve in the engine room that you'll have to open in order to actually accept the fuel, which arrives at a rate of less than infinity, unlike before.

A cool consequence of all this new complexity is that you can also open the refuel valve when undocked to vent fuel. I don't expect this to be very useful, but because the utility dock is right on the nose of the ship, this can provide weak but usable aftward propulsion in a hypothetical MacGyver-like emergency.

For now, most of this happening virtually, but it's ready to be hooked up to gamespace controls in the near future (see roadmap below).

Propellant Control

In other engine room news, the propellant manifold & pump functions are now complete.

We have manifold valves to adjust the flow of fuel to each booster as well as to individual RCS thrusters. The main purpose of these is to compensate for uneven thrust due to hardware damage. Limited booster valve control is also available via a yaw trim slider which will live in the cockpit, within easy reach of the pilot seat. On the RCS-side, there is an additional valve for dialing in the 'docking power' mode to your preference.

The pumps, which will eventually use electricity, adjust the response rates of the boosters & thrusters. Again, this can be used to compensate for uneven wear, but it can also be used to improve the response of a cheap piece of equipment at the expense of increased wear damage and, eventually, power draw.

This hardware (as well as the utility dock itself) is all implemented by the same system as the rest of the ship hardware, meaning that I can easily make it all breakable, repairable & upgradable if that ends up feeling like a good idea. For now, I'm just leaving them as stock parts baked in to the ship, for fear of making shit too complicated.

Tentative Roadmap

Of course this will change, but here's the roadmap as it stands today. We've got a long way to go, but I don't think there's anything standing in my way now except myself, and that guy basically does whatever I say.

Newtonian Flight Systems In Place

I'm back in the groove, as the pendulum swings, and more or less caught up to where I left off last summer. Which isn't terribly far, and it took longer than expected, because it always does, although 'caught up' isn't really accurate with all the improvements made along the way. Systems that I felt were too shallow are a bit deeper, while overcomplicated aspects of the codebase have been simplified.

Everything is more stable and better optimized. I'm fixing problems as they occur rather than adding them to a to-do list and focusing on blasting through to the next feature. Feels good, man.

Main Flight Systems

The RCS, booster, and gyro systems are all in place now, rounding out the basic flight controls. I still have a lot of features that I'd like to add to those systems, but the foundation is built in a way that should be conducive to adding new components with minimal pain-in-the-ass.

Those additional features will be things like startup procedures and system-related engine room equipment, as well as power & heat management, two things I kept putting off in the previous project once I realized what a mess it was going to be to implement anything beyond the absolute basics. This time around, I've kept all of those future problems in mind while building the initial system implementations. It won't go as smoothly as I'm expecting it to, I've learned to distrust that instinct, but it should be a hell of a lot easier now.

Interior Fuel System Components

Fuel System Diagram

I'm currently working on the first bits of engine room hardware for the RCS & boost systems. These pump & manifold systems can be adjusted to compensate for asymmetric wear as well as to generally tune your engines, either by pulling back on power to conserve fuel and protect the hardware from wear damage, or to hot rod yr shit with abandon.

The controls for these pieces of equipment will be mostly located in the engine room, associated physically with the equipment itself, but some functions may be available in the cockpit for convenience; most likely, at least, some sort of yaw trim for keeping your boosters from pulling in one direction. This is a problem that can also be corrected with the new auto-stabilization options, or of course by dealing with it manually like a heathen.

I'm just getting started on all of this, so I may have more to say about it next month. In the meantime ...

Check out Sylph!

I've been getting my sci-fi flight sim kicks from Sylph for the past couple of weeks. It's a small-ish game (I think?), but if you're into the genre enough to be reading this then you'll probably dig it.

I made this long-winded (as is my wont) tutorial video if you get stuck at the beginning, but I encourage you to give it a good try on your own first. You don't get many opportunities in life to figure out how a spaceship works, after all.

Easy Does It

The work continues, but alas, nothing exciting to report this month. A busy-as-usual spring beekeeping season, a weeklong camping trip, and Dave the Diver all conspired to slow my progress. So it goes.

I haven't even got to the booster system yet, to be honest, but I also put a bit more effort than expected into finishing the damage, repair and upgrade systems. Since they'll be shared by probably all of the remaining systems, I want to get them as right as possible the first time, and I think they're there now.

So all good in a no news is good news kind of way, and I think I should be able to buckle down and get back to it properly this month, now that the bees are done acting swarmy and Dave's done diving.

Item Skin Maniac

Nothing too exciting this month, still reimplementing systems and catching back up to where I left off back in August.

The systems architecture that I wrote about last time is in place, although it took longer than expected to finish up because I, like, forgot how programming works. Been a minute since I finished that CS degree. But it feels good to get back into a software engineering mindset, and I'm very happy with the result.

Fuel, RCS & Gyro Systems

The development of this new version has been pretty abstract up to this point, so I figured what this spaceship flying game could really use is the ability to fly a spaceship. To that end, I got to work on reimplementing the RCS system. I talked about this back in June & July, so you can scroll down for more info, but basically the thrusters now work in a more realistic (and satisfying!) way, they can break and wear down, you can fix them and upgrade them, and I've added a few new in-cockpit features. I mean, the cockpit doesn't exist yet, I haven't got to the 1st person stuff, but it's all working with default keyboard controls.

Getting the RCS system back up & running required that I reimplement the fuel tank, which is also now upgradable. The tank & it's fuel have mass, so it'll be up to you whether you prefer a smaller tank for a more maneuverable ship at the cost of more frequent refueling, or a big-ass long haul tank for the full lonely space bastard experience.

The RCS thrusters can now provide auto-stabilization c/o the gyro system, which means that I also had to reimplement the gyro system. Again, I wrote about this in more detail last summer if you want to dig deeper, but basically everything is cooler than it was before.

I should be clear here that shops don't exist in the game yet, so you can't actually upgrade anything, but the systems are in place & ready to be eventually hooked up to a shop UI of some sort.

Coming Up Next

I've still got work to do on all the systems mentioned above, but they're just about done. Next up is the booster system, which should go pretty quickly. With a flyable ship back in the game, I can move on to system-scale simulation which should catch me up to where I left off last summer.

Epilogue That Nobody Asked For

numbers unknown to science

Systems Architecture Revamp

As indicated in the previous drunken devlog that I barely remember writing, Black Road Sky is finally back on track. Still have one Nubby achievement left to grind, though.

As you'll know if you've been following along, I started the BRS project over last year, but didn't make a whole lot of progress before needing a longer break, so I've just started over again. I know what I'm doing this time, I know what I want the game to be, and I've solved all the major technical difficulties. Now it's just a matter of getting over the terrifying realization that I have years of near-daily work to do. But, like, what else have I got going on?

The work, and therefore the devlogs, will be fairly boring for at least a few months, maybe more like a year. How boring? This boring:

Ship Systems Backend Architecture

Ship systems, and the interplay between them, got very complicated in my last attempt even though I was nowhere close to the final vision. The code wasn't quite spaghetti-bad, but maybe like a nice bucatini. Confusing, anyway. Basically it wasn't vamped good enough, so by god I'm revamping it.

IT'S DIAGRAM TIME BITCHES

Ok, so the diagram kind of makes it look like I'm just making things more complicated, but hear me out.

First of all, the systems themselves are, by design, never calling per-update events (Update() or FixedUpdate() in Unity), instead everything is called by referencing each systems' handler function from a single point, the player ship controller class. So it's trivial to see, at a glance, what order shit is happening in, which is kind of the thing that makes programming hard. This goes a long way towards untangling the bucatini.

Second, system logic and hardware functions are handled separately, which again just helps in managing the logic & order of events. Both system and hardware classes derive from base classes which hold all the common stuff like general health stats, repair functions, cockpit button interaction handlers, and so on. Nice & clean.

Finally, the actual hardware stats (thruster power, response time, durability, and eventually things like cost) are held in logic-free stat blocks, glorified plain text files that Unity calls scriptable objects. That means that I can quickly & easily create new hardware components with just a few lines of text, and maybe even open it up to modding. Not sure about that, though, probably shouldn't even have said it.

I'm also doing a better job of commenting code for future me, who as it turns out is kind of a dunce, and following best practices for Unity-specific things. When I started making this game it was my first Unity project (I mean, I guess it still is), and I couldn't have given half a fuck about whether a variable was initialized in Awake() or Start(). But here I am now, giving a bunch of fucks.

Coming Up Next

More exciting diagrams and shit, probably! And I'll let you know if I 100% Nubby's Number Factory, but I've been pretty distracted lately by My Summer Car. Got a lot going on over here.

All Nubbs Must Come to an End

Yo yo yo, had to take a break to play Nubby's Number Factory but baby, WE ARE BACK.

Well, we are back. Putting it all in caps was a bit disingenuous. Performative. I mean, I am back. Never really went anywhere. But I am getting back to work now.

On Black Road Sky. Not on Nubby's Number Factory. I mean, both. All things, all of the time, in every possible configuration. One of these times I'll nail it.

Still Chillin'

Nothing to report, but life-things have chilled out and I think I'll get back to work soon.

I've been prototyping a few other game ideas, just in my downtime at work, including a fantasy small plane sim that I might keep working on alongside Black Road Sky, but this remains my main project and I have no intentions of abandoning it.

In other news, Apollo is taking a lot longer to learn than Gemini, holy moly.