Early last week I improved the dock with and collide AIs. For the dock with – since the hangars/bases tend to have multiple launch tubes for fighter drones I enabled the use of all of them not just the first one as was the case as of the previous post’s writings. For the collide with AI I modified the “aim lead” code for projectile weapons and now have a freaky good collide with AI. Very happy about this because prior to this it was embarrasing to have the ore drone ship constantly miss colliding with the ore rock, then eventually getting lucky, it was made worse since you’d see multiple drones trying to smack into one rock, but ending up orbiting it. The other good news about the improved collide with AI is that I can use this for better “intercept AI” across the board. Since this tweak has ships leading other objects and chosing a path to intercept – where the object will be – not where the object is – which in case of moving objects – tended to mean lack of collisions/intercepts. So I can use this for combat AI, for formatino and go to AIs as well. Eager to get this implemented.

The mining process is mostly done its fairly fun to watch now that the pieces are fairly competent, it adds life to the game. Now I need to finalize dock with AI a bit, put in a error correcting system in place.

I then did some more work towards the HUD and UI – I realized that my line of thinking was deeply flawed – a face lift to a bad system – leaving the project with a better looking bad system. So I opened up a 2d paint program and dabbled some, when I’m ready for more contract art I’ll have a much better idea what to ask for, since I already made a lot of mistakes a long the way.

Then came some tweaks to planets, now there can be textured planets, including an atmosphere level, fairly basic stuff, but a good begning and opens up the door for lots of experimentation – again to see what works and what doesn’t.

This weekend I did a bunch of stuff across the board working on the HUD, story sytem, triggers. I also enabled the ability for ships to carry other ships – so unlike carriers the host ship doesn’t manufacture the ship(s) it is carrying, the host picks them up then drops it off. Allowing for the use of smaller ships carrying fighter drones, or beyond.

Next up – I’m getting close to implementing a “dialog” system – so instead of the old “Objective pop up” where the game pauses, they will be a real time conversation going on that the player may actively participate in – I haven’t decided yet. At this point the first leg of the “story” aspect of the game should be fairly well under way, meaning that I can release the next iteration.