And finally...

Just a quick pre-bed post. Poker was a great laugh but I played like a disadvantaged pigeon as usual. Ho hum. But the guys spent about 10 minutes fiddling with the game, and as a result we now have a yaw control on the bumper buttons. It's pretty nice actually, so thanks to Charlie for the idea. The laser collisions are now all up, and the player shield level indicator and recharge rates are also working nicely. I tweaked the AI "FIRE!" relfex - basically when they've got a clean shot at you, they take it. It's not exactly a fight for your life as soon as the game starts though, and I'm going to spend part of tomorrow tuning their other behaviors, and adding an "orbit" behavior since I'll need that for orbial trading with the planets. I'm also going to add the commodity types so when you bag some cargo you know what you've got.
Not only that, but powerups are on the horizon. For each 5 "attacking" ships you destroy, you get a temporary powerup to your speed, or to your laser, or you get the short-range teleport (see previous post for more on what that is and what it's for). That should see me through until next week, which should see the close of business on the basic space-based engine. Then I'll be moving on to the trading screens, since by then I'll have cargo coming out of the wazoo. The obvious next step after that is getting the AI players to trade inteligently, shipping goods from planet to station, selling, buying new goods with the proceeds, restocking on missiles or whatever, and deciding where to go and sell their new stock...then off they fly! Simple! Yea, well, ask me about it next Friday eh?