Been meaning to update, always short on time so I’ll try to keep this short…

Currently working on turrets as main guns, watch them pivot/turn to their target, press the trigger and they fire, very neat. These go with the new corvette, very cool model. The barrels on the new turret weren’t positioning exactly on the center/top of the turret’s base so this threw off my muzzle flash positioning code, converted it to use “bones” instead (in case you aren’t familiar, models can have bones, which are used for animation and positioning). This method is much better than old method, but required some code re-writes.

Flying the new corvette with the “turrets as main guns” feels really neat, I enjoy it a lot, the turrets auto tracking gives them and the ship a “living/intelligent” feel. Looking forward to take advantage of this in the future on other ships.

The corvette also features a “secondary” weapon, a “charging gun” that can push objects away. Gotta code in the support for the secondary weapon…

Thinking that the end of March release goal for iter 11 maybe somewhat out of reach, but will try to get it done.

The goal is for iteration 11 to be available at end of this month (March). In keeping with this goal I’m trying to focus on general polish and readiness in addition to mostly minor additions… Sometimes polish gets boring so adding something in keeps me motivated, but I have to try to keep it to the less intensive elements so that I’m good to go by the deadline.

One of “less intensive elements” is the new HUD markings in ship mode, I’ve added a little HUD marker to show whether a ship is a friend or foe. Before this the only way to tell would be to target the ship or to switch to tactical mode (since tactical mode has objects colored with faction colors). This is a really cool thing because you get the sense of what’s around you, and will be especially important since the player will be able to capture/build a vast array of ships so simply looking at the hull configuration doesn’t always indicate whether it is a friendly or not.

Some minor tweaks and fixes: made the aim assist of projectile weapons more accurate, my code had an inconsistency which depending on the position of the weapon to the ship would throw aim off. The funny thing is that this inconsistency became apparent only when we changed the ship and weapon parameters, making everything faster, which also boosts projectile range as well (since distance = speed * time).

The other thing that I’m working on is tutorials. I’ve tweaked the old tutorials, for example showing how to use the afterburners and turrets. Also I’ve added a gravity drive tutorial which means I had to add a “go to object” objective.