The past two weeks were very busy “real life” wise. Me and my wife painted the living/dining rooms (including the ceelings) – about a week ago, and after the cleanup and some other real life getting in the way (some of them very nice) of game development deals.

Anyway this weekend was a bit of a catchup on doing “nothing”, partly to blame was the rain all day today weather. But this meant that I had a very good productive game development weekend during which I worked on the “gate travel” system. Basically right now there are “rock gates” in the game out of which ships of the “Outsider” faction come into the “sector” and cause trouble. To add variety to the game and to have a more interesting story and elements I always intended the player to be able to travel via these gates as well. So right now the player is able to activate/deactivate these gates for travel and pass through the gate. Which right now results in a panning back of the camera and the ship speeding off into the void and then the ship is removed form the game world.

This took a bit of a engine re-design, basically adding a collision object class. A collision object (as opposed to a physical object) isn’t shown in anyway on the screen yet ships can still collide with it. Basically its an invisible square/rectangle. When a ship collides with it something will trigger. Right now the gate travel – but in the future other possibilites are on the table, for example mission triggers, objectives (eg: go to position), weapons (flak/granade weapons), and even a push back on a ship blowing up within a certain radius. Lots of interesting stuff I hope.

Next up is having a new map load and the ship exiting the new map’s gate.

Gate travel has a lot of interesting possibilities and it brings a lot of complecities, right now I’m trying to take it one step at a time and see where it leads.