Taking a break from OpenSS13 for a while (still lots of stuff I want to add to it, but not for the moment). Instead I'm working on a completely different project, an RTS naval combat game.

This is an idea I've had kicking around for a while, in various forms. The concept is a two-team game (1 or more players per team) where each player controls a single ship at a time, and can swap to other ships at will. I'm aiming for a WWII-era sea combat feel, though without submarines at least for the moment.

I'm planning 8 ship types (from motor torpedo boats up to aircraft carriers, and an unarmed cargo ship), with unit building limited by base upgrades rather than any kind of research tree. You'll also be able to build new bases in redefined parts of the map, and the win condition is destroying all your enemy's bases.

So far I have ship display working, with pixel positioning and scrolling, and 32 movement directions. The ship graphics were traced from various deck plans using Adobe Illustrator, then rotated to each of the 32 directions and rendered. I then used some small custom Java programs to chop up each PNG file into chunks useful for importing as a DMI file.

A quick test showed the display of 250 ships is fast enough that under real conditions (max 30 or so ships active) I shouldn't have any problems with speed.

The next job is collision detection, ship-to-ship and ship-to-land, which needs to be pixel-precise, so I'll probably be using a crossing-vector method with each ship's outline. Fortunately DM's built in tile system works for quick-culling of potential collisions, so speed should be tolerable.

I'm still deciding on the role of aircraft (perhaps player controllable just like a ship), and overall ship speed. I don't want a twitch game, so I'm thinking of a quite slow pace to
movement (except for fast things like MTBs and aircraft). After some research, I was surprised to find that WWII-era carriers and battleships tended to move faster than frigates and smaller craft. I will probably forsake realism and make bigger ships slower than smaller ones, for the sake of balance.