Hi folks! Thanks for reading the latest Airship Commander update! Today we’ll be talking about the upcoming release. The main topics are adjusting course based on your feedback, implementing room scale and motion tracked controls, and finally performance improvements.
The initial plan after the first Early Access release was to focus on integrating capital ships and missile combat into the core combat loop. Both of these features were well along in development when we approached October 6th, but we decided to shelve them to ensure other parts of the game got the attention they deserved. Pushing capships and missiles to completion seemed like a natural next step.
Once we launched though, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we got was how much folks wanted room scale and “touch” input. We realized early in development how compatible Airship Commander was to both those ideas. Relatively small decks made for easy teleport aiming, and the game was filled with levers, wheels, and other naturally grab-able props. Like a lot of good ideas it was shelved to help get the first release complete, but it was never far from our minds.
So based on this consistent request, we changed course and implemented room scale and motion tracked controls. The foundation of this work was the WONDERFUL Virtual Reality Tool Kit, available on both the unity asset store and their website. This very rich collection of prefabs, scripts and examples let us hit the ground running with basic inputs like touch, grab and teleport.
There was still a decent amount of work put into mapping the existing controls to the tracked wands. The steering wheel in particular took a lot of tuning. The first implementation split the wheel in two and if you “touch” the right side it would rotate to the right (steering the ship in the process). While functional it didn’t fulfill the fantasy of spinning the wheel, so v2 incorporated grabbing. Now you can grab each of the spars on the wheel and give it a good spin to turn. Very interested in what people think!
https://youtu.be/QnAE65fPdSs
Another major focus of the next release was improving performance. The cities in particular were grossly over budget, not playing well with either the engine (meshes too big for batching) or the graphics card (draw-call-apalooza). We spent a lot of time tearing apart each frame we were drawing and started make good process in getting verts and draw calls under control. There’s still a lot more to do, but on machines similar to mine (the min specs of the game) you should be relying less on asynchronous time warp or re-projection to maintain a playable framerate.
We’re hoping to lockdown new features in the build in the next day or two, then spend a week or so bug fixing, optimizing, and polishing. Thank you for your continued interest in Airship Commander. It continues to be a dream come true being able to realize this game, and we appreciate you being a part of it!