Look Out!

A very early feature request in Fleet Combat Online was for ship collisions. Another request some time later was to be able to battle on different "maps" that have obstacles on them such as asteroids and planets, etc.

Both of these features have just been deployed. When you create a game now, you have the option of selecting a map to play on. As of now, there are only two maps, but I will be creating more. The maps will have asteroids and debris and other things that must be avoided during battle.

Implementing the map required me to do some decent complex polygon collision detection. It wasn't too hard to go from there to detecting collisions between ships as well. So ships can now collide with map obstacles, and each other.

For testing purposes, collisions do not yet cause any damage.

I want to make sure first that the collision detection works and the resulting "physics" of the collision are reasonable. I also want to see how often collisions happen -- are you constantly running into your own ships and the enemy. That might get frustrating if you lost the ships every time you ran into something.

The obstacles will also block projectiles, beams and ship decoys. Fighters however, can fly right through the obstacles -- they are manuverable enough to weave around them more easily. I might change this in the future too I just figured since you can't control fighters directly it might be annoying to have the AI choose a course around the obstacles that causes problems for them.

Also, the AI is only vaguely aware of the obstacles at this time. They will try not to hit them, but they will still fire their weapons when their target is behind an asteroid. So battling the AI around the new maps might not be so satisfying yet, but they will get an update soon.

Beam Curve

I have updated the way that beam weapons work to make them more powerful at longer range, and less powerful at short range.

Up to now, the power delivered by a beam weapon has decreased linearly with range. Using a set charge amount, firing at a target twice as far away would do half the damage. This worked ok, but it made beams very deadly at point blank range and almost useless at anything over about half range.

Now it is using a cubic function to calculate the rate at which the power of the beam drops off with distance. See this graph:



The green line is the "old" linear drop off rate. The red line is the new drop off rate. You can see that the power of a beam drops off very quickly with range at first. Then levels out for a while, and then drops off again quickly at the edge of its range.

This means beams are more powerful at long range (the curve is above the old green line from 50% to 100% of range). But they are less powerful at short range (the curve is below the old green line from 0 to 50% range).

So if a target is at 75% of a beams range, you will do almost the same damage to the target as if it was at 40% of the beams range.

This change applies immediately to all beam weapons (point defense, lasers, phasers, energy drain beams and tractor beams).

Well That Was A Bit Messy

I think, finally we are all moved.

Everything was all set for me to just switch the domain name over (so that www.fleetcombat.com pointed to the new address) and get the latest copy of the data onto the new server. Should have been about two hours of downtime.

Then in the middle of doing that I found out that the new hosting company had somehow deleted all the permissions settings I had made and generally just wiped everything on the new server out.

So I had to basically start over. So we were down for about 16 hours instead of two.

But we should be all up and running now. If you see this, then you are on the new server. Let me know if anything funny happens.

Moving Day

Well, not necessarily today, but sometime this weekend, Fleet Combat Online will be moving to a new hosting provider.

The host it is on now is pretty expensive ($25 a month) and my account there is running out of disk space fast. They charge an outrageous amount for added disk space. So I found a much cheaper host ($10 a month) that offers more than four times the disk space.

I have been moving the site over there the last few days and it is working fine. The last two steps are to move the database over, which will require about an hour or so of the site being offline and changing the domain www.fleetcombat.com to point to the new address. Unfortunately, DNS changes take a while to propogate out across the internet, so the next time you come to the site, you may get an error or a notice that the site has moved. Nothing really I can do about that, just keep retrying and eventually you will be taken to the new server.

I hope this doesn't cause any trouble, but moving a site can involve all kinds of problems so bear with me please :)

House Rules

There is a new feature to add some variety to the game play. Today I have deployed "Advanced Game Rules".

When you are creating a battle, you will see a button that says "Show Advanced Rules" on the 2nd page of the "create a battle" wizard process. If you click that, a panel will show up that has a whole bunch of custom rules you can apply to the game.

These rules fall into three categories: Game Rules, Player Rules and End Game Conditions.

Game Rules:
You can specify what kind of ships can participate or not. For instance, you can disallow carriers, or you can specify that only ships with FTL can participate.

Player Rules:
Here, you can set restrictions on the kind of player that can join the game. You can say no newbies, or you can say newbies only. You can also restrict players based on how often they fail to submit orders on time.

End Game Conditions:
There are two new ways to end a game: First Blood and Flag Ship Death. First Blood means that if one of your ships is destroyed (any one), then you are out of the game. The other condition is pretty self explanatory -- if your flag ship is destroyed, you are out of the game. The "Flag Ship" is defined as the most valuable ship you have in the battle based on its command points.

So try them out and as usual, let me know what you think.

Site Outage

The site has been down for most of yesterday and today. Even when it was up earlier today, it wasn't really working right.

My hosting company changed something about how file permissions were handled, so the application could not write to the file system. This means it could not save any changes to the game data like orders.

So, if you have been unable to play for the last 24 hours or so, thats why. Everything should be fine now though. If not, report any problems in the forum, or using the feedback form. (Hopefully those still work!)

Survey Says!

I need more feedback. There are only a small handful of players who participate in the online forum, and they have been very helpful. But I need more information than that.

Here are some interesting stats:
354 battles have been played so far. (not counting stalled games that were deleted)
There are 171 players who have signed up and "activated" their accounts.
148 of them have only joined one game or less.
That means there are only 23 people who have played in more than one game.
40 people have participated in the forum.

I am not concerned with the low overall number of players - it is a beta and I have done no advertising. I am concerened with the small fraction of signed up users that actually play.

So I want to know why so many people sign up and then either don't play it at all, or play it once and leave. Now, a large number of those users may have encountered some show stopping bug in the games less stable days, but still it seems like most people come to the site and sign up and then never play.

The forum doesn't seem to cut it. For whatever reason, people don't want to (or can't) post in the forum to ask questions.

So to that end, I have set up a survey. You don't have to be a member of the site to fill out the survey. The survey shows up on the home page. Once you have taken the survey, it no longer shows up.

I will periodically update the survey with new questions as I get answers and as new questions come to mind.

Thanks for those that have given feedback so far! You are the ones that make a "beta" game possible!