Our first view of the Harpoon Class fighter, as well as our first explosion.
Nothing makes me feel better than to work on tangible parts of the game, by which I mean graphics, sounds, etc. Today’s update is chock full of exactly that. Finally, I feel like the player can actually do something.
- You can kill other ships. Oh, I’ve already had that? Well did it include a full on explosion with dynamic particles and sound? Because now it does. Boo-ya! Each explosion has a random number of particles, some of which are Fireballs ( bigger, slower, fire texture ) and some of which are tracers ( smaller, faster, whiter ). I think it could look somewhat better, perhaps with a 3rd particle type or something, but as it is it’s pretty nice. In addition, the particles take the dead ship’s motion into account and so you have some nice effects when the ship was at full speed. The particles also will bounce some off of the terrain so that it conforms to the shape of the area instead of dumbly wafting through everything. In addition, the explosion creates a shockwave and nearby entities will be pushed away and slightly damaged.
- Sound effect when you bounce off a wall? Check.
- Fully 3D ship models! I mentioned this in the last update, but now I’ve actually taught myself Blender and created one. Introducing the Harpoon class fighter. The texture still needs some work, but I’m pretty happy with the model itself. Getting a model from Blender to the game is a bit tedious ( Export to OBJ with about 8 specific options checked, then rotate the texture to match, then run my OBJ to AVVL utility. ) But I’m pretty stoked.
- Ships now bank when turning. This works great, but honestly it’s not as sexy as I first intended. Originally I was using the angle between the ship’s orientation and the ship’s actual direction of travel to calculate the bank. When you were leveling off as you straightened out it was slow and sexy, proportional and beautiful. Unfortunately it also caused you to completely FLIP OVER when rotating 180 degrees or bouncing off a tower. Efforts to clamp the rotation to a specific bank also met with wild failure. So I had to do it the basic but works way of incrementing the bank while turning and decrementing it while not. Don’t get me wrong, it works very well…. just a 7 instead of a perfect 10.
- Added a new tile type: Scandium. It’s purpose will be a mineable metal that can be used in the construction of other things ( ships, weapons, defenses ). Many more tile types are on the way, but before I get too crazy with them I want to work on the mechanic that actually allows you to harvest a tile. So that’s what I’ll be working on tonight.
UPDATE: Like I said, explosions cause damage…. I just caused a chain reaction of 5 ships getting destroyed because of explosion damage. BEST. SUNDAY. EVER.