The Odyssey Windows, Metro, MetroTab game

The Odyssey

AvengerDr | Released 2003

In The Odyssey you play the role of a Fleet Commander in a space conflict. The game can be best described as X-Com meets Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars. It is a turn-based scifi tactical game.

The Story

It is 2282 C.E.: Humanity has colonised the nearby planets of the Solar System and established outposts and research stations in the Trans-Neptunian reaches of space. However, more than 15 billion people now live on Terra and tensions between the Old World and the New Worlds are high. An almost depleted Earth is highly dependent on her colonies, although it remains the sole authority in the Solar System.

The Eye of Titan, a space telescope in orbit around Titan, has identified various planets in the habitable zone around nearby yellow main sequence stars: Tau Ceti, Sigma Draconis and Eta Cassiopeia. Three ships using an experimental Anti-Matter drive have been built. Theory and laboratory studies confirm that it will be able to provide enough power to warp the space between the Solar System and the destination. In practice, it has never been tested before. The UTS Winter Solstice, the UTS Dream of Mankind and the UTS Odyssey are en route towards the far reaches of the Oort Cloud where the Anti-Matter drive will be activated. Each ship will escort a small flotilla of ships carrying colonists in cryogenic stasis, deployable factories and biological arks. The voyage is one-way only. You are the commander of the UTS Odyssey and all of mankind’s hopes are with you. Especially after NASA's Chiron program, a generation ship travelling at 0.1 times the speed of light, failed to contact Terra after its 50 years voyage to Alpha Centauri.

The setting

The game is set at the very beginning of interstellar exploration. No alien civilizations have been contacted yet, if any do exists after all. Humanity’s only enemy is itself. The Odyssey, your ship, is a space carrier. Close to Pluto, it will rendezvous the UTS Voyager, a colony ship; the UTS Gagarin, a transport ship with the resources to build infrastructure upon landing and the UTS Darwin, a biological vessel containing seeds, embryos, livestock and everything else needed to jumpstart life. Its route is set towards Sigma Draconis. It is expected that the warp field generated by the Odyssey’s drive will envelope the other ships as well.

The Game

Somewhere along the way towards Sigma Draconis, conflict will erupt. One of the key points of the game is that you as commander will not have total control over every single ship in the fleet. Alongside the traditional “Action Points” of turn based games, The Odyssey will build on the concept of “Command Points”. Your character will only be able to influence or advise a limited number of ships in your fleet per turn. The ships you do not choose to advise will act as their own ship captain will decide. Each ship captain will have RPG-like characteristics that will influence its decisions. Bravery, morale, discipline, etc. Each ship will belong to a particular “class” which will define the type of operations it is able to conduct. The Odyssey is a space carrier. It hosts several vessels capable of orbital insertion and interplanetary sublight travel. It is armed but it is something that has been kept hidden to the public. All other ships in the solar system are armed with high precision lasers against space debris, at best. Over the course of the game you will have access to ships capable of boarding and long-range strikes. The general idea is that capital ships do not enjoy the same manoeuvrability of single-pilot vessels. Once in motion, a capital ship will take several turns to “brake”. The game will feature a story-driven campaign, possibly more.

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Atmospheric HUD controls

Nov 3 2014 News

Last month has seen little development as I needed to move to another city in the UK where I'm going to start a new job. So for the last weeks I have been living among boxes (and still am to some extents). Further, the new development machine I built had to have some faulty components so development has been delayed.

I am still busy implementing some features needed for the introductory cutscene. I have refactored the UI so that it is scalable. The size of every control is expressed in "Units". At 1920x1080 a unit is 32 pixels long. At different resolutions, the basic unit is scaled accordingly. For example 2560x1080 is 1.333 times bigger than 1920x1080, so a unit would become about 42.6 pixels.

Posted Image

The picture is supposed to represent the Commander's HUD as the ship travels near Mars towards Saturn. The game itself will not be in first person. The rendering seemed a bit empty so I added an "atmospheric" HUD control in the lower right, the one with the caption "Singularity Phase". It is a simple column chart implemented in DirectX. The control derives from the basic ItemsControl in my UI library that allows generating templated child control based on its ItemsSource property, just like in WPF. For now, you can simply assign an array of float values and it will create the appropriate number of columns in the chart, giving a relative height depending on the chart's width, height and minimum and maximum values set for it.

While animated, the chart looks like this:

It was really simple to implement and animate. Basically the RandomColumnChart derives from the base ColumnChart and exposes a Period property. The period represent the number of seconds before new random values are generated. During each update, each column is interpolated from the current start values and the next array of values. After the specified period of time has elapsed, those values are used as the new starting values and new ones are generated. Then the cycle runs again.

I might need another of these controls to display some kind of sin waves for example... But I shouldn't let myself be too distracted, I'd like to start working on the main part of the game soon!