	Deep Nebula 
CS 248 final project, Fall 2003
    Eino-Ville Talvala

Gameplay:

You control a small fleet of capital ships, tasked with destroying all enemy forces within the region.  You are in a dense nebula, which limits your sensor effectiveness.  

Interface:

The game is turn-based, with up to 4 players.  Several maps are included, with varying cloud features and densities.

Select ships by left-clicking.  Hold down ctrl to select multiple ships.

Three commands are always visible on the lower right panel.  They are:

(tab)Sensor mode: Toggles the view between normal and sensor mode.  See below for details of sensor mode.  Holding down tab shows the sensor mode as well.

(N)ext ship: Selects the next ship in your fleet

(D)one turn: Ends your turn and switches to the next player.

Additionally, the escape key can be used to quit the game.

Use the on-screen panel for issuing commands to ships, or the keys listed below.

(M)ove: After giving the move order, select a destination by moving mouse over the movement grid, and then left-click.  For vertical movement, hold down ctrl.  Note that your ships have limited time to move per turn.

(R)otate: Like move, but the ship only faces the desired direction, it does not move.

(A)ttack: After giving the attack order, left-click on desired target.  The selected ship(s) will face the target and attack with any weapons that can (1) target the enemy and (2) have firing time left for the turn

(T)arget: Like attack, but the ships do not turn to face the target before firing.

(S)top: Halts the selected ships.

Each ship also has several weapons turrets (and the Orca escort carriers have a hangar).  You can select these individually to give orders to the specific subsystem:

(A)ttack: Like attack for the whole ship, but only this turret fires if it is able.  The ship does not move.

Burst fire: Toggles the turret between shooting a short burst of fire, or usings all its remaining firing time on the next target.

Show cones: Toggles the drawing of the turret firing arc cones, which show the range in which the turret can target.

Two additional shipwide commands only have keyboard shortcuts:

(C)ones: Toggles the firing cones on the entire ship.
(L)ights: Turns off ship and turret lights.  No current effect on gameplay.

Sensors:

Each ship has sensors that are limited by the thickness of the nebula.  The denser the nebula is in a given direction, the less the ship can see in that direction.  Ships that used to be visible, but are no longer, are drawn in their last known position in wireframe in normal view, and in darkened wireframe in sensor view.

Sensor view:

In order to see farther into the nebula, use the sensor view.  In this view, cloud regions are drawn as boxes of varying translucency, depending on their density.  Also, ships of each player are drawn in wireframe with the player colors.  Any selected ship will also show its sensor envelope, which is the volume within it will detect a ship of standard sensor signature.


Bugs/Issues:

Currently, there is no way for a player to know what happened during the other players' turns.  This can be very disorienting.


