Sorry if the vids a bit disorienting. I think something went wrong with the recording. I slowed it down to half speed but it still seems faster then the actual game.
Its been a month now since I released anything for PS3 so here is something new. Its a flight sim although I’m not really sure if that is the correct term considering that its not simulating real world flight. I started it almost a week ago and intended it to be like a one day project that I would be able to just throw together and then return to working on my other games. But I kept running into problems and its still heavily flawed and incomplete.
It uses sixaxis motion controls for steering, L2 and R2 make you spin, L1 is for shooting and R1 is for acceleration. Pressing select inverts the controls for turning up and down.
There is no credit screen yet but there is a LOT of borrowed stuff that went into making this game. I’ll list it all out later.
Feedback is as always greatly appreciated. Its a genre that I’m not particularly familiar with (the only flight sim I’ve ever played much of was the PC version of Incoming and that was ten years ago) so I could definitely use some guidance. Whats your favorite thing about modern flight sims?
Some suggestions on the enemies behavior and movement would be especially appreciated. At the moment I find it to be simultaneously too easy and too difficult. As long as you keep moving its almost impossible to get hit by the enemy blasts. But unless you just stop and turn around its also fairly difficult and time consuming to ever shoot them. Slowing their move speed would make it impossible for them to keep up with you but increasing it would make it impossible to turn and shoot them well you are still moving. Slowing their turn speed would make it even easier to avoid being shot by them but increasing it would once again make it impossible to turn and shoot them well you are still moving. Maybe having them alternate between actually following you directly and just circling around you might work…
ThatOtherDev 
i think it wud be better like 3rd person. like neo racer where u can see the plane but it looks god as it is.
Look nice!
I almost expected a rather animal-like character to pop-up, telling the player to “do a barrel roll”. 🙂 But then again, the last airsim that I ever played was called Hellbender (Windows 95 install CD’s contained a demo, go figure).
The following is a memory dump of my brain at this very moment, if it doesn’t make sense, feel free to ignore it! Also I don’t know if you plan to make it realistic or just ‘pew pew pew’…
Do you use AI for the enemy strategies? I didn’t find any information about that on your blog… But judging from the video and the list of games on the right I do think you know your way around.
I once experimented with an AI package called OpenSteer for a C++ project (http://opensteer.sourceforge.net/). Seems the last update was done in 2004, so perhaps it’s dead. It worked for us, but don’t know if it’s worth getting into…
An option could be to make your ‘bullets’ faster or fired in bursts (——-). That could make the possibility of having them collide with an enemy a bit bigger.
Perhaps have some sort of bullet that you can detonate remotely? In essence, a ‘dumb’ missile without target lock or a space mine, with a big damage radius. Then again, these are easily dodged and therefore only useful for stationary or slow targets.
If speed is the problem, perhaps missiles might work? That takes away some of the fun of the aiming, though. Ofcourse, if the enemies have missiles too, you’d need a way to shake them (outrun, deviate or duck behind an asteroid). Programming these could be done with ‘ordinary differential equations’ aka ODE’s)
Target lock could help in targetting, or some sort of radar that warns you if an enemy is close could help in locating/targetting them, giving you some extra seconds to dodge/lock on.
I wouldn’t touch the speed of the player/enemies, space sims look nicer if they have that zippy fast feel to it, but that’s just my opinion.
Nice 🙂
Thanks for your work.
has anyone re-packaged it for Geo-hot’s mfw, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it but I just can’t figure out how these things really work yet(I’m only just learning programing now….) If anyone has could they be kind enough to upload it
I haven’t really looked into how to do it yet but now that the tools are available I’m planning to sign the next release of the game with I’m rushing. It might be up as soon as today.
I second the making enemy bullets faster option, thats what I did but it also has it draw backs. Also I think the background image is a bit to “stretchy”, maybe you could push it back a little
The next update of the game is going to have a higher resolution texture for the sky 🙂
sign me up