I have a rudimentary “asteroid” mining system in place. Thanks to a new asset which is a cannon mounted to a rock. The cannon shoots an asteroid, the weapon fire creates “baby” asteroids that splinter off. Then a nearby drone hangar base launches drones which pick up the rocks and ferry them back to the base. Its pretty neat! I just have to polish up the collide with and dock with AI. It works, but the dock with AI needs error correction in case the ship doesn’t get in on its first pass. This is all automated or as usual the player can hop into ship, blast the rock then hop into a drone and pick up rocks. I hope that this aspect of the game adds to the live of the world, gives something for the player to attack, guard etc. There’s going to be another way of mining asteroids, for different factions, we’ll see

I also received another new asset – a “base” station. So I worked on having it orbit a planet. Planets were originally in the very early days of the game – in fact one of the earliest pieces of code I wrote was having them rotate and orbit around a sun – this wasn’t accurate in anyway, but hey they did move. I scrapped planets when they weren’t big enough or were too big and became navigational hazards, but always wanted to bring them back. And now they are – yay! For planet rendering I modified the new sun shader code by letting diffuse and specular light impact the “planet” object.

While adding planets, I polished up the sun/light handling code – now there are different types of “suns” – invisibile ones (only emitting light), billboard ones (2d sprites) and physical ones (ones that you can collide with). Adds a good balance of tools for future use.