Hey kids!
I’m going to try doing a better job of coming out with weekly devlog entries reporting on our progress. I apologize ahead of time because I doubt I’ll be able to keep it up every week. However that’s no reason not to try!
Since our last update, I have worked on a number of different aspects of Angular Velocity:
- Fixed shader so that it works on Nvidia cards. It sucks to think that all this time I just had to change a simple 1 to a 0 to enable my game for literally half of the gaming community, but there it is.
- Fixed Launcher so that it correctly parsed directories with spaces in them. This allowed Windows XP users to play the game.
- Added a progress bar to the Launcher. No more guessing at how much longer the update will take!
- Added the Lithium resource.
- Added new crafting schematics: Glass, Carbon Fiber, and Battery. The graphics for the battery are far from final, but I wanted to get to it quickly. Why? Glad you asked! It gives Lithium an immediate use, and it’s also our first example of a schematic that requires previously crafted items as material. Here’s a hint: a battery requires Lithium, Glass, and Carbon Fiber.
- Changed the chase camera to use the frame delta instead of a fixed delta to calculate position. English version: The camera should be smoother and allow you to see further in your direction of travel. ( See screenshot at the top of this post )
- Changed the “Tower” to “Reinforced Concrete”
- It’s now easier to craft multiple items. Just keep clicking! ( I feel like singing Dory’s Swimming song: Just keep clicking, just keep clicking! )
- Terrain Generator underwent further changes. Really you should just expect this every week. Tweaking the balance and distribution of resources is non trivial, and I’ll probably never be fully satisfied with it. Having said that, there was one major change: There are no longer random columns of reinforced concrete laying around everywhere. That was previously in place to help me test collision detection and bounce angles for ammo. Since all that is done and we’re semi-published, I figured the time was right to take it out.
- Turbo Boost! You can now increase thrust and maximum top speed by holding down left shift. The exact boost you get will depend on your ship’s engine. Also, in order to use this, you must have Nitrogen in your hold. Think of this as NOS. You’ll burn nitrogen fuel until it’s gone as long as you’re holding down Left Shift.
- Shadows are now calculated on larger textures… up to 8192 x 8192 pixels on the highest quality setting. On the downside, the shadow is mapped out over a much larger area. This was necessary so that the edges of the shadow texture didn’t show with our new wider view of the world.
- Ensured that the shadow texture never exceeds the largest allowed by the host system.