Docking and command mode

I mostly finished up the explosion enhancements – having them push and damage objects. Created some funny “unintended consequences” while testing – such as infinite explosion loops. What would happen is – I’d have an explosion damage nearby objects – in this case an asteroid, which would spawn baby asteroids as a result, that when they’d explode would damage the parent asteroid. Infinite loop of explosions and thus a hang up of the game – have to be careful with these guys.

Then I jumped off to begining of re-doing the docking mechanism, previously docking was handled via a distance check – when a marine ship collided with an asteroid base that it was intent on capturing and if the marine frigate was within 30 units in distance of the docking area, then the marine frigate docked with it, but this method isn’t very precise. So instead of a distance check I’ve created an invisible collision object (just like the explosion area of effect invisible collision object) that waits for a ship to collide with it, this object is located at the docking tube, so this is now much easier to predict and more precise. This will lead to better docking mechanisms, potentially allowing the player to dock with bases for trade, story, capturing, and other purpouses.

After this I went back to command mode – I left it a bit because I became frustrated at the now much more complex control mechanism, but I found a better way and am very satisfied with the current state of it. Also I’ve updated some of the commands to be more intuitive – for example for the “go to or move” command – before I had the player use the A and S keys to move the go to position left/right, but now I changed this so that the mouse left/right movements do this, I think this is better and easier. Feeling pretty good about it. But now we are coming to some of the annoying polishes and more decision making. I might jump off to another area before tackling command mode again.