Capital Command News

[h3]Demo time! Take command of a battlecruiser in Capital Command's opening battle. Learn to fly and fight for real in outer space, as the crisis escalates. How well will you cope?[/h3]

The Steam Next Fest is almost upon us, and it'll be a great opportunity to present Capital Command's playable demo to all you space jockeys out there.

The demo will consist of the campaign's prologue battle. It's still work in progress, so I'll provide more details in an upcoming post, when it's done(tm). Expect a combination of narrative introduction, scripted mission and tutorial. It will give you a good feel for how the game plays second-to-second, and the tools to be reasonably effective flying and fighting your ship.

This is why I've been keeping silent these last few weeks. Time seems to be compressing as release approaches, and I've prioritized working on the game, to have the best possible demo ready for you when the Next Fest hits.

I hope you'll like it!
The dev

[h3]Capital Command's HUD and interface are WYSIWYG: everything you see does something, and everything you can do is a button on the screen. Tooltips explain all the details.[/h3]

CC is a complex game with lots of features and mechanics. I really want the player to understand and use all available tools to annihilate the enemy, but I also really hate long, boring tutorials. Beside being annoying, big tutorials usually end up trying to teach too much too fast. The predictable result is that the player will instantly forget half of what he learned, as well as how to use half of the rest.

Capital Command takes a different approach. The game does have a "prologue" battle, but it teaches exactly one new piece of information: that holding ALT unlocks the mouse cursor, allowing you to hover over the game's interface.

The UI is designed so that everything you can do in the game has a button on the interface. If you hover the mouse cursor over a HUD element, you'll see a description of what it does, how to operate it, and the keyboard shortcut to activate that functionality.



Of course, the prologue mission is designed for complete newbies, so it points out which parts of the UI are useful in various situations. But it's up to the player to ask "hey, what's that button for?", hover the mouse over it, and discover something useful, or at least cool, to do.

Advanced players may not need this functionality, and they will have the option to turn it off. But, on balance, I think it's more useful than it is annoying, which is all a tutorial can ever really hope for.

Well, at least, that's the theory. Looking forward to your feedback!
Thanks for reading
The dev

[h3]What could a pre-WW1 book about war at sea have to say that's relevant to space combat? As it turns out, surprisingly much.[/h3]

"Some Principles" is an attempt to discover order in an apparently chaotic, and certainly very complex, field. Wars were fought at sea in vastly different contexts, for a multitude of purposes, using ever evolving weapons and platforms. Yet they have common features, and most of those apply to wars in space as well.

Space is like the sea in one basic way. The vast majority of it is only useful as a means of communication between places, and it's those places that are strategically important. The sea, like space, is only a pathway, but controlling it provides significant benefits both in peacetime and during conflicts.

Also, both are fundamentally hostile to human life. We can survive there, we can even build ships to move about, but it costs significant effort and resources, and we become far more vulnerable than in our natural environment.

Based on these similarities, Corbett's insights on the roles and limitations of sea forces apply equally well to space. I'm nowhere near qualified to give informed opinions on strategy, so I won't even try. But if you think space wars are interesting, you should definitely give it a read.

Enjoy!
The dev

P.S. I realize that A.T. Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History" is far more well-known, at least in the U.S., but I can't honestly recommend it. I feel it falls short of Corbett's work in both historical accuracy and logical consistency, to the degree that I didn't make it past the first chapter.

[h3]RR posts aren't about Capital Command, but rather about things that you'll probably enjoy if you're interested in this kind of game. Today's treat: Atomic Rockets![/h3]

Development on Capital Command has been slow lately, so today I'll cheat a little. Instead of writing something moderately interesting about the game, I'll point any interested readers to Winchell Chung's little masterpiece of a web site.

Atomic Rockets!

Don't let the somewhat dated web design fool you. It's a treasure trove of information about sci-fi, science, space flight and much more. It's got just the right mix of hard facts, well-written explanations and clever prediction.

What I like most about it is how many topics it covers. From realistic space engine technology to the likely expansion rate of galactic empires, there's reasoned discussion and witty commentary on almost any sci-fi topic.

Enjoy!
The dev

PS: He's wrong about stealth in space, though. That whole section needs some rethinking. But the rest is great!

[h3]Movement in space is complex and difficult to visualize; Capital Command has tools that provide this information intuitively, so you can focus on making the best decisions.[/h3]

The basic problem is that you can't simply look at a thing in space and tell how it's moving. A ship can be turned towards a target that it's attacking, and at the same time move sideways relative to that target, and both could be moving backward relative to some third ship.



Everything is relative, as the old saying goes, although that's not quite as valid as it used to be.

The jump drive that opened up the galaxy imposed some new considerations to space combat navigation. To jump, ships need to be not moving relative to the nearest astronomical objects. This is called the "local frame of reference", and in most situations it is practically unchanging over short (1-10 thousand km) distances.

Captains must always be mindful of their ship's velocity relative to the local reference, aka local velocity, because ships can only jump if their local velocity is close to zero. Accelerate away from that, and you'll be stuck crawling along at a few kilometers per second, while your enemy can jump vast distances in a heartbeat.

Even more important is the target's relative trajectory. It determines weapon availability and the future development of a tactical situation. Its opposite, the ship's trajectory relative to the target, is the easiest way to understand how a ship needs to use its propulsion in a given situation.

The target info box on the HUD displays information about the current target's position and movement. The first line shows current distance and rate of approach (positive when the target is approaching). The second line shows current relative speed and the angle of attack. This is the angle between the ship's forward direction (its nose) and the current relative velocity. When the AoA is 0, the ship's nose is aimed along its relative movement vector.

The third line show data about the point of closest approach between the ship and the target, assuming their velocities stay the same. Distance is how far the two will be, and time is how long until it happens. If the time value is negative, closest approach has already happened, and they are currently drifting apart.

While this information allows a captain to quantify the target's relative trajectory, as they say, an image is worth a thousand words.

[h3]The Radar Display[/h3]



Capital Command uses a circular display to represent all space around the player's ship. The middle of the circle is what's in front, the periphery - what's behind, while up, down, left and right are exactly that.

The prograde and retrograde symbols represent the direction of the ship's current velocity and its opposite. If a target is selected, this refers to the velocity relative to the target, while If nothing is selected - to the ship's local velocity.

This makes manual navigation easier. Boosting causes the prograde direction to turn towards the ship's heading, with the greatest effect if the boost is at straight angles to the current velocity. To move towards an enemy, the relative velocity must be pointed towards that enemy. To move away - the opposite. To be able to jump, local velocity needs to be near zero, which requires boosting in the retrograde direction.

Contacts are also displayed on the radar as little shining dots that pulse at regular intervals. Nearer contacts pulse before more distant ones, allowing a rough estimation of range as well as bearing.

There are toggles under the radar display that control whether the radar displays only navigation symbols, only contacts, or both, and whether the radar's forward direction is the ship's nose, or the camera's current angle. Depending on the situation, captains can choose how much information they receive and and how it is displayed.

[h3]Trajectory Markers[/h3]

When a contact is selected, its trajectory relative to the player's ship is displayed on the HUD by a broken line. The dots are spaced evenly apart, and pulse to indicate the direction and speed of the contact's movement. The dots are colored differently along the trajectory, with the color changing at the point where the contact and the ship will be at maximum approach.

The same functionality exists for the player's ship. By default it is enabled only when nothing is targeted to display the ship's local velocity. Buttons above the radar allow switching between trajectory display settings, so the captain receives the information most useful in a given situation.

Another special trajectory marker is used the nav computer interface. When the autopilot panel is opened and a nav setting is active, this marker displays that setting's intended course. When the setting is relative to a target (eg attack trajectory), the course is relative to that marker. Otherwise, the course is relative to the local reference system, or not shown at all (eg the Full Stop setting will not show a course at all, since its intended course is zero).

The same functionality is active when the cursor is over autopilot setting buttons: it shows that setting's intended course, so the captain can estimate how useful that setting would be in his current situation.

These are some of the tools that Capital Command uses to convey position and movement in 3D space. The goal is to make the player aware of where things are and how they're moving, both of which are equally important in a tactical situation.

As always, thanks for reading and see you next time!
The dev