Early this week I received a new ship asset – model only – and then textured it. It is a bit rough doing this myself, but right now this was the best out of the bunch of limited options, and since I need this asset for the Beta the choice was clear.

The asset was meant to be a repair frigate – but became a repair corvette when finished. The model when done seemed a bit too much like a corvette so there we have it. Still I’m very happy with it, any new asset is a huge deal for the project. Over the weekend I added the visual for the repair ship’s “repair beam.”  Originally I intended to use visuals similar to the “conventional” laser beams, but in the end I felt that this style of beam was too similar too an offensive/weapon beam. So instead I switched to a “particle effect” style beam. Meaning that I had to add some new code for particle effects based beams. There is a bit of a “annoying” thing in the visual because it clips through the model that it hits. Not sure if I’ll correct this, other games tend to have (some) beams clip through so we’ll see. After the visual I worked on the AI - its very simple its since the repair beam is – technically -  a weapon I just have the repair frigate attack the friendly ship – re-using attack code. Some questions arise – should repair ships find their own targets? This would be easy to do – but it could be annoying having ships be too automated, and have repair ships wander into combat. We’ll see.

Today I spent time working on gate travel code in prep for the new sector, and then did a bit of mission scripting. Some more code is required – requesting re-enforcements though a gate, then more scripting.

I was actually fairly frustrated today because I found it hard to concentrate. My mind refused to focus a few times, in the end a good amount of new things were added.