Another day, another dead alien...

Bugh, boy this is good fun. I'm making reasonable progress, but I've been deliberately slowing myself down to polish stuff as I go along. I've changed the HUD display this morning because what I came up with last night looked like cat poo and wasn't really giving the user what they needed. Now, when your reticle is highlighted in yellow (i.e. an enemy lock is available), then an icon for the "lock" button pulses on the missile panel. Press that button and get your lock, then the button icon changes to the missile launch button, pulsing faster. Cancel the lock, or launch the missile, and the icon goes away with your lock. The general look is much better, and I think it makes it clearer as to what's going on. Have a look!

Not bad looking. There's more alien laserfest 2k9 action going on now, and watching AI ships dogfighting, with all the laser effects and explosions, is really cool. I've got the first "public viewing" of the game so far this evening (before the weekly poker game begins) and I'm keen to work in as much feedback as possible from the goons. Before they arrive I need to get the player ship "attackable", but this won't involve drawing any additional models or doing "per mesh" collision detection, I'm just going to use an arbitary range of 150 meters (yes, I'm working in SI units, of course, I'm a physicist!) for impacts. The shield display is already visible in the right-hand panel onscreen, and as the shield level drops, the shield icon glows more and more red. Of course you start the game with a shield charger (unlike the AI ships, for the moment anyway) so as it recharges it'll do back to green. When it's been green for more than 5 seconds, the display will change to a summary of your cash balance, cargo load, legal status and whatever. The other "holes" in the right-hand panel will be for the missile-jammer upgrade, a short-range cargo teleporter (fly into a cloud of crates and activate it - booom you got 50 tonnes of free shit. The upgrade won't be cheap though!), Mining Droid status, and race/mission status. The teleport will have a dedicated controller button, which will flash alternately with it's action icon, when a crate or crates are in range. That'll be the Y button. For the missile jammer it'll be B. Mining droids and races/misisons will be controlled from a shipboard computer screen, which will temporarily replace the normal HUD and some of the playscreen when activated. Any button on the D-pad will activate that screen, and you use the D-pad again to navigate, A and B having their normal menu functions.

There will also be four navigation "helpers" below the radar screen - one telling you if you're in a position to enter planetary orbit, another for station docking, and finally one for hyperspacing to another system. It's amazing how, when you choose the right code and design paths, features just seem to leap out at you. By the time next week in finished, I expect to have all of the free-space functions finished (apart from hyperspace), and when that's done it's time for the "market" functions to be added in. At that point technically, I suppose it'll be a game in it's self and I think it's important to focus on the freespace game as if it were a stand-alone project. I really want the entire experience to be as exciting as possible, as polished as possible, and as smooth as I can make it. We're not really running into any framerate issues yet provided I keep things to sensible levels, as I said in a previous post.

Anyway blathering on about features won't get them written, so I'd better get back to it if I'm going to be ready for the testing this evening. One more screenshot to keep you going:

There will be a rendered image of the alien "pilot" where there's a gap in the info panel on the left there. That's what you see when your target is locked in. Fun eh?