Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Dev Diary: Dreadnought Early Screenshot



Ah, the fidelity. Clearly the interface could use some work. Actually, I'm still working with the render basics in general.



tagged: ,

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I just want to make sure you're not screwing this up. It will have Roguelike (i.e. vi editor-style) movement keys, right? Otherwise, I'm not playing it.

Josh said...

At the moment it's all mouse. That's in part because that would be my preference anyway (repetitive key controls with double tendonitis? ouch) ... but mostly it's because it doesn't require a new layer of key detection to work.

That said - adding that layer won't be hard down the road. In fact, it could probably even be customizable. There's a bit of split here and there - but nothing that couldn't be made to work.

And that layer would probably arrive -anyway- because even with mouse control it's always handy to have the occasional macro handy.

Now I think the RL I play the most at home (Angband) uses cursor keys for 90% of movement and menu control.

Josh said...

Oh gosh - you didn't think those big grey bars were move buttons, right? I could see where they might look that way.

They scroll the map.

Josh said...

Lemme just add:

The current mouse controls work in that you just point the mouse in the general direction you want to move - kinda like an RTS would operate. So you don't have to keep moving the mouse to a specific square, just sit one side and click to move. The mouse can be right next to the player's position or far away.

Unknown said...

Angband is my RL of choice. My first move, as soon as I install it on any machine, is to set "use Rogue-like movement keys" to true. I find that the most natural way to play.

Yes, I "grew up" using vi editor on Sun workstations. It's a beautiful thing.