Suns and Stories

During the week I worked on a “sun shader” – basically getting rid of the old “static yellow ball” sun and putting in an animated replacement. What currently exists is leagues better, but still (hopefully) not the finished product. A huge improvement and I’m happy to say goodbye to the yellow ball.

Here is a WIP video:



Few things to tweak – add rotation, potentially add “sun glare”, add “god” rays.

In other news I started working on the story elements. It was a bit of a tough start, because I didn’t quite know where to begin, so I decided to create the starting “map” and go from there. Because of the beginings of the story as I currently see it, the player needs to be friends with the faction that attacks the player in the current game in iter 14. This meant that I had to make factions – how they relate to eachother, more complex and dynamic. So I spent the weekend coding ways that this can change in game, and ways to keep the state of the faction as it changes in the game, before this factions were static. If they were enemies or friends they always were. This took a bit of re-work, but overall the coding so far is simple as it doesn’t involve 3d math :) I also tweaked some game art to prepare the starting ship of the player. I think its going to have a few unique characteristics that will be pretty cool :) I actually didn’t even code the first “objective” – which is a sort of a mini tutorial – a go here objective – since I had to first ensure that the nearby asteroid base and defensive platforms wouldnt’ blast the player into rubble.

I had a thought while doing this – that if I change the “story” to be just a series of very rigid missions, then I could hard code a lot of these values and that would make things so simple as to not need a lot of these past few days and future days coding. Anyway it crossed my mind and I continued coding – hopefully it will end up as I envision it, or at least close enough to resemble my goals.