Finally, a cumbersome virtual fantasy card deck with no intended purpose!
I woke up in the middle of the night like a month ago with this dumb idea and I couldn't fall back asleep so I started making it and now it exists. The UI/UX is terrible, as always. The deck structure is based on the Shenzhen IO solitaire deck, so if you want a real pain-in-the-ass way to play a specific version of solitaire then I got you fam.
With the physics simulation in place & (basically) working (mostly), lots of cool things were already possible in Black Road Sky. Orbital rendezvous! Interplanetary transfers! These are the kinds of things that I want the gameplay to revolve around. But, Space is mostly space. To execute these maneuvers requires useful instrument readouts which the game sorely lacked (and still does, but, like, not as sorely as before). So the next step was to give the player some basic tools to reduce the amount of finger-crossing required to transfer orbits or rendezvous with a space station.
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| The pink circle is target direction, just point & burn! Carefully! |
The first things that I added were straight out of Kerbal Space Program, and I gleefully continued to steal their symbology. I added target direction and velocity indicators (as well as their opposites) to the navball, making close range orbital rendezvous maneuvers much more straightforward and enjoyable. This information was already available in text form, and still is; the numerical x/y/z breakdown is much more accurate and is still useful when you really need to dial it in. But even with practice, the numerical readout can be hard to understand. Up until now, achieving a parking orbit meant to "adjust your attitude to align your relative velocity with the negative Z axis, then throttle up to nullify your relative velocity". Now, it can mean "point toward that green symbol and blast off until your relative velocity reads close to 0". It's still not easy. You still need to know what you're doing. But it's a lot more fun this way, and more realistic as well ... if you accept however many grains of salt it takes to make you believe that manned space trucking with pre-Apollo level technology is a thing for a thriving interplanetary civilization. MOVING ON.
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| This update focused on optimizing meme potential. |
The next improvement was to add ascending & descending node markers to the orbital map, relative to your target if you have one and to the planet or moon's orbital plane if you don't. This is still a bit buggy as of this writing, but it works great when you're in orbit around the same body as your target. Not so much for interplanetary transfers, I still have some work to do there. But for station rendezvous, this symbology along with a 'relative inclination' readout adds the necessary 3rd dimension of information to the 2-d orbital map. I really like the 2-d orbital map. I don't think it's going anywhere so deal with it.
It doesn't work with target planets or moons outside of your SOI, due entirely, I'm sure, to my less-than-amateur expertise in astrophysics. I'll figure it out eventually. One of the problems with interplanetary transfers at the moment is that you usually end up way above or below the target's orbital plane. The new target direction indicator on the navball helps for making close(ish) range course correction burns, and the node symbology is useful once you're in orbit, but I still have a lot of work to do in order to make interplanetary transfers more fun than tedious.
Speaking of making shit more fun, that was the focus of the next update. Spoiler alert: I kind of failed, but you gotta spend money to make money, right? Right?
I am meddling in powerful forces that I do not understand.
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| Minor Arcana Template |
That is to say, I am learning HTML5 Canvas.
"Ah, the 2 of Slime ... reversed, a dire portent, perhaps a fall from grace. But here, The First King suggests renewal, growth and well warranted ambition."
~Oprah Winfrey, So You Wanna Fuck With Tarot TV special, 1999
