(Seriously, is a clean, hierarchical todo list with deadlines & sharing options too much to ask for??)

Scrum? Whiteboard it and take a pic. About as easy at it gets.

Woot, billboarding. I was hoping we'd see some of this - it'll massively improve frame rates, as Josh said. Plus, now we'll be able to accurately see zone boundaries - or more accurately than we have been, at any rate. This should also give us some leeway to work on the asteroid pop-in issues.

not sure what billboarding is, but i have some thoughts on hardpoint HUDs, which I may share when I get the time.

About the hardpoint display for targets:

I think it would be perfectly plausible if it is less detailed than the players' own display, due to limitations in sensors and so on. Practically, a display with less information can easier be stuffed into a small icon.

For the sake of architectural purity, it could still be the same display with different "zoom levels".
Zoomed in, it would display more information if available. Zoomed out, it would show only the most basic information .

Hyperion wrote:not sure what billboarding is, but i have some thoughts on hardpoint HUDs, which I may share when I get the time.

Simple, my good sir.

Imagine a tree. Now imagine that you take a picture of that tree, exactly as you see it. Now imagine taking that picture and simply placing that picture, rather than the tree, on 3d terrain.

Done correctly, billboarding can be just as effective as the real thing. You get far, far lower poly count with all the quality - it's just a little shortcut trick to fool the eye.

Done inccorectly, you have a rotatey mess of jumbleld, oddly-shaded trees. But I doubt we'll be dealing with anything like that from our great coding wizard, with him being the graphics buff he is.

Did someone say trees?

Hmm....from what I've seen so far, trees are not the coding maestro's strong suit. I do hope his colonies fair better in the game.

i guess he could at least muster some mandelbrot trees (in 3D)

not necessarily trees - I was just using them as an example. asteroids fields are more along the lines of what he's aiming for right now.

Talvieno wrote:not necessarily trees - I was just using them as an example.

I know that, Talvieno, get with the programme. *chuckle*

I was referring to Mr Parnell's miserable attempt at representing these noble lifeforms in Development Update #7.

I'm all for billboarding trees.

Talvieno wrote:I'm all for billboarding trees.

You just can't beat a good looking tree.

JoshParnell wrote:I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how planetary ring zones might look with hundreds of thousands of lightweight asteroids...

Did he just say....... hundreds of thousands?!?!?!???

Welcome to billboarding. Where thousands of polygons become one... per asteroid. Or tree.
Done correctly, you can't even tell they're billboarded.

Scogali wrote:

JoshParnell wrote:I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how planetary ring zones might look with hundreds of thousands of lightweight asteroids...

Did he just say....... hundreds of thousands?!?!?!???

In the end they must look like belts, not a couple of rocks

Even though you didn't manage to get in the zone, Josh, I enjoyed your log entry. Describing your experience of flying around in the LT universe is a superb start. It's what we're all looking forward to doing.

It was also good to read the section on wormhole zones and the decision you've made. It sounds good to me but I think I may be biased in favour of the choice you've made.

Imposter tech...yes..umm..well it sounds great, Mr Parnell. I'm sure if anyone can sort out imposters it's you.