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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Fuel Ranges

I investigated MoO 1, and measured its parsecs in pixels (if you turn the grid, lines are spaced 5 parsecs apart.  DOSBox upscales the screen from 320x240 to 640x480).  I found that 5 parsecs equals 100 pixels, so 1 parsec = 20 pixels.  I then measured the star sprite, it's 11 pixels.  I then compared my star's sprite, which is 32.  Almost exactly 3 times bigger, so I've set my game's 1 parsec to be equal to 60 pixels.

Then I implemented fuel ranges, mostly.  There's some bugs and some polishing-up that I need to do before it's complete.  While implementing this, I thought, it's kinda annoying having to click on a star with your scout, and see if it's within range.  If not, click on another star, and so forth.

So I decided to add a visual layout of your fuel range.  This can be toggled on/off by pressing the "F" key (I will later add radar range layout when I get to radar code).  You can see two circles in the below screenshot, the normal range and range with extended fuel tanks.  On left, the destination is within range, while on right, due to colony ship having no extended fuel range, the destination is out of range.  What do you think?  Something that you'd use?


5 comments:

  1. I'd use it. It is a tedium to check whether or not a star was within range in MoO1

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  2. Yep, useful feature.

    Just a sanity check, people back then did all sorts of weird things: does the size of the star sprite in MoO 1 influences distance? I mean, is distance measured from center or from the nearest edge of the sprite?

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    1. I'm not sure, but from my previous observations, it looks like the fleet moves from left of the star towards its destination in MoO 1. I don't know if that affects distance or not. Besides, it's only at most maybe 5 pixel difference if so, not too much difference, I hope :)

      However, in Beyond Beyaan, the distance is the distance between two stars' centers. So even though it looks like the fleet is on left/right side when issuing movement orders, the distances are correct. You can see this when ending a turn, the ships move onto the line between two stars when it start moving.

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  3. Yes, definitely a good feature.
    However it can be seen even on the demo images, that stars on the border are still uncertain - like the purple star at 7 o'clock (probably in) or the red one at 11 o'clock (probably out).
    Again: it's already much better than using my eye-o-meter :)

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    1. If the center of the star is within a circle, then it's within range. The purple star is within range, but the red star is just outside the extended range.

      One other difference between MoO 1 and Beyond Beyaan is that when you have a fleet selected, hovering over a star will show the "tentative" path, so you don't need to click on each star to see if it's within range. Right-clicking will confirm the path that you want the fleet to take. A lot less clicking for exploring compared to MoO 1!

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