Woof woof!

Well well well, we now have a powerup system in place. Currently, every kill results not only in the ship's actual cargo being released so you can chase it down and capture it, but also in a special "powerup" crate, which is lit in yellow (the normal cargo has red, green and blue lighting) and labled on the HUD as "POWER UP". When you capture it (i.e. fly into it) you get given a powerup. You can hold more than one powerup - they're displayed at the top of the screen, and by moving left and right with the D-Pad, you select the one you want to use. Pressing B then activates it. There are three powerups: Laser Boost, Missile Restock and Cargo Teleport. Laserboost gives you two lasers each shot - from either side of your ship - and you can really cut through swarms of enemies with it. It only lasts for 60 seconds though (HA! 60! It'll be less than that soon enough!). The teleport is great - every floating but of cargo within 50k of your ship gets beamed into your hold - including powerups. Funtastic! Here's a couple of shots from tonight's build.

Nice little planet. I've got some very high poly count spheres in the game now. Don't think they need to be any rounder! The atmos glow looks great there - I'm drawing it in alphablend mode so the "night side" atmosphere is transparent. Not realistic, but it looks good.

Big ol' fight going on here, which I started. You can really get stuck in to these dogfights now, and the payback makes the hard work well worth it. Takes about 30 seconds to shoot the first ship down, but then you get on the powerup treadmill and they start falling like ninepins!

Here's the powerup display. If there were more than one, then the "active" one would have the red border. The HUD text (top left) is working nicely too - I toyed with the idea of a "screen" graphic but I'm glad I didn't. There are a couple of lighting/FX things to tidy, and I need Charlotte to do some "real" graphics for the powerups and shield map, but I think by the end of the week I'll be ready to add the trading engine...and that's where the fun really begins!

G'night!