I overcame the major hurdle to make ship radar a neat feature – transparency. The way the the radar works is by creating a seperate scene, camera and window. The camera shows the scene which is simply 2d radar “blips” – which represent the reletive positions of objects in the radar. Anyway it took a bit of doing, but I got rid of the background of this window and thus it doesn’t obscure the hud as much – yay.

I wanted to add a “cone of sight” to the radar screen – and did so in the form of a 3d pyramid shape to represent the view from the ship. But it turns out that this pyramid is a bit tricky – it obscures other objects, changes their color, etc. There are tweaks to do, but for now I’ll let it go.

I also worked a bit on marking system for objectives in the HUD and tactical modes. For example if the objective is to capture a base then a yellow arrow will appear on the HUD pointing out the base that needs to be captured.

I’m running out of things to add before I focus on working on the story and its related elements. This isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of polish, tweaks and even features to add, but the time is getting near to start on the story elements. It is a bit of a scary thought – since this will begin to test many things.