At last something visible in space combat! Well, by the time I finish this post it might be complete :). Boring stuff first, some more ground work had to be done in order to trigger space battle for right player at the right time. The way how battle events are pushed to GUI had to be more strictly defined and there were some changes in AI handling. Then there was also a question of how to organize ongoing battle data. I started with what there was in CroVar version and after some experimentation I ended up with game within the game structure. Space combat is going to have similar model-view-controller pattern as the main "galaxy" game and will not be entirely stuck inside the main game. It would pop in to existence, run as separate entity and feed the results to the main game.
Now fun stuff, image above is how game looked on paper a year ago. I've been thinking about space combat for a long time, I've decided to abandon one dimensional simplification from CroVar and do proper 2D tactical TBS. And while I'm at it I could do it on hexagons. Math is slightly more complex then it is for square grid but only slightly and there are few tricks for representing hex grid in memory in a same way as square grid. Image below is how it looks like at the moment, a grid, a star, a defender near the star and an attacker's fleet on the edge (exact location deduced from the direction it came from).
More coming soon!
