Pirates Ahoy!

Well, I've properly started the re-write of Space Pirates from Tomorrow, and it's been a very productive day. I have a working solar system generator, player flight controls, and a nice gravity system that includes a nice, smooth way to stop people crashing into planets. And I added a bloom post-process. The ship controls are like an airplane - you can dive/climb and rotate your ship around it's forward axis. Bombing round the solar systems is good, they're not too big but there's enough room for plenty of trader ships and pirates, which is good news! Even better, the game is wrapped in a tidy animated menu.

So, over the course of about 13 hours today I've got more done than I thought I would. The only disappointment has been with an atmospheric diffraction shader, which seems to operate on a different origin to all the other shaders - but that's been put on the pre-beta fixlist, and will be dealt with after all the base functionality has been put in place and before we go for initial playtesting.

So, the plan for tomorrow is to add manufacturing, imports and exports to each planet, a way to shift goods from one planet to another at a profit (and in a realistic, dynamic market) and a spacestation to allow extra-system imports and exports. That means also adding trading ships and an "orbital trading" interface. And an in-flight HUD, including a scanner. That sounds like a DrawableGameComponent to me.

That's it for dev day one. I'm off to bed to think about commodities...yawn!