Sunday, January 20, 2013
Summary
Very fun day, much better than the average slow Sunday!! I started the morning with working up a list of things I wanted to target and destroy this week. At this point, about half of my list has already been crossed off. You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. Indeed! Always a nice way to start out the week
It was really a boatload of smaller things that got done today. I made subsystems damageable, so now you can blow up and incapacitate weapons and thrusters. Speaking of blowing things up, I spent a good bit of time improving the explosion effects, which needed some work. They still do, but they look much less "perfect" now, since I've added some shape to them. Ah, and speaking of weapons - I implemented correct weapon tracking. The weapon is now two distinct parts: a base which rotates only about one axis, and a barrel which rotates only about the other. This is a typical turret implementation, and yields a nice visual effect. Previously, you may have noticed the whole gun was moving uniformly when I aimed. Now it looks much more natural! Speaking of guns, I improved the pulse weapon visuals. I still think they could look slightly less "cheesy," but I'm getting there.
I also drastically improved performance of the particle engine, which was hogging a good bit of CPU time creating those lovely little puffs of dust and minute space particles that you probably haven't even noticed No sense wasting lots of performance on something you can hardly see!
Speaking of shields (wait, what?), I worked on generalizing the way that shields are implemented in the game. Well, suffice it say they're sufficiently general now. A shield object can be attached to anything with a generator, which I've added as a new type of hardpoint. So far we have thrusters, weapons, and generators. I'm thinking generators will be used for anything that basically consumes a constant stream of energy to provide some effect - shield, cloaking field, long-range scanner, etc. Oh, and if you have multiple generators, there's no rule that says you can't put a shield on each of them so...multi-layered shields? Sure, why not! I don't see why this would be a problem gameplay-wise, although I haven't tried it yet. Could make for a very nasty surprise when you finally pop that battleship's shield, only to realize that...there's another one. Oh dear. Of course, could make for an equally-nasty surprise for your enemy! Especially when those fighters think they can drop through that outer layer to sink a few bombs in...only to witness the bombs exploding on the surface of an even tighter inner shield. It's the Limit Theory mentality. Why impose a limit when there doesn't need to be one?
Let's see if I can't finish up the other half of that list tomorrow!
Hour Tally
Coding: 5.33
Internet: 2.89
Testing: 2.19
Total Logged Time: 10.42
Post
Mon Jan 21, 2013 12:17 am
#1
Week of January 20, 2013
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford