Oh my my my, now we're getting pretty close to something like a game old man...

An excellent few days, yet again, and rock solid progress is being made. Where to begin? I'll go in the order that the uploader put my photos - back to front, which is nice.
This bizarre looking screen is the player going into hyperspace. Yep, you heard it right, you can now hyperspace between systems. All 4,000 of them. Enemy ships can also hyperspace out, once they've docked and fueled up. They also sell and buy when they're docked. It's ace. The market moves as they buy and sell, which is just the way we like it. Speaking of trading, the markets are now procedurally adjusted to reflect the technical capability of the system.
Here goes some fella off into hyperspace. Just about kept pace with him. The "warp bubble" effect isn't quite bang on in this image, because I was fiddling with scale matrices trying to get the bubble to deform, like a drifting large soap bubble. I decided I wanted to keep that effect for the plasma shroud effect, so I just need to reset the scale factor to...ohh, I'd say 40ish.
This might look like a dull shot at first, but let me explain. The green arrow in the middle of the screen is pointing directly at the space station. If it were behind me rather than in front, the arrow would be red. Also, if I don't have a station license it won't show up at all, unless I'm in race mode. Not only that but you can toggle it by clicking the left thumbstick. This funky little addition has made flying about 75% simpler and more enjoyable. Good tweak that. I'd been planning to do the colourswap for a while, but I was getting sick of the damned thing getting in the way myself, so I just chucked a simple toggle into the controls code.
Again you may not be too impressed with this screen. But note the new background style. That there skybox, full of galaxies, nebulae and stars is rendered IN GAME from a library of astronomical images, some from my own observatory and some from the Hubble archive. The smaller areas of colour, and more regular small "signpost" images makes complex moves in dogfights much less tough. Now you can really get a grip on how fast and far you've looped round looking for the attacking enemy, or cargo, or whatever.
Finally, the navigation screen. Tomorrow I'm plopping the code in for System Data (a proc-gen potted history of the system), Large Map (showing the entire sector, where you are, where you're going and where you've been before. When this goes live we'll really start to see the scale of the game. I know already how big it is, but I've only seen areas about 20 LY square, which is 1/10,000th of the game, or something around there. And there's every chance that we'll increase the number of systems to around 10,000 in the final build. Blammo! Not sure about that background image - I may use that for the large map and just have a grid system for the main map. The position of any tracking limpets you've deployed will also appear on this screen, telling you what system the enemy is in, how much swag and cash they have and other mission specific details.

Today has largely been a day of tidying up code, improving AI behaviour, cleaning up the nav screen and making sure it all fits on a standard def TV. It does. I've also changed the "blip" colours to make them stand out a little better, although this still needs a little work to make sure we get the right colours. The system name generator is working admirably, as is every other aspect of the sector/system generators. A new type was added to the particle system today too - a nice blue plasma ball effect. I'll add another (green) one for the railgun I'm going to code this week too, which means running collision detection on asteroids because you'll be able to blow the living pooh out of 'em with a railgun. Tasty.

The basic "fly, fight and trade" stuff is pretty much there except the more advanced powerups. Once they're done it's on to the mission engine, which means also adding the following:

"Reply" to an email, asking for work or help;

Military powers distributed through the systems, with frontier systems being very active and violent and having shifting "rulers";

Large-scale battles in frontier systems, which of course you'll be involved with once your ranking is high enough.

Semi-permanent enemy ships, which "stay alive" in other systems;

Once those are in, then the missions can begin. Taxi, courier, hit, meet, hijack, kidnap, harrier, incursion and battle are the main mission types, some of which will be random, some character-driven and some market and battle driven.

I think I might have to implement the game save and load stuff tomorrow too, but that's no great hardship. The same display code as the markets and upgrades will be used to show saved games and free slots (limit of 8 I think), you can mark one as "autosave and load" so that your current game-in-progress file is loaded at game start if you like.

Away from the coding work, Char's making great progress with the alien character graphics and I've written another 2 tunes - one for a gameplay trailer (a weird, 1980s take on The Impossible Dream with a vocoder) and a "Pirate Theme" which is another Kraftwerk pastiche which might replace the existing theme tune, "Fortitude" - but that'll be used somewhere anyway. The idea of a programmatic sound engine is on hold at the moment, mainly because I have to draw the line somewhere ;0)

I must get round to writing a proper intro to the game...