April has been a busy month! I’ve been putting in a lot of hours bringing the game back to demo level with the new graphics and the new code spurred on by some good pressure due to awesome interview with Fists of Heaven and a video chat with ThatCooperFellow. In retrospect, the whole year has been rather busy if I think back on it…. here are some things I’ve been up to…
Lasers, missiles, explosions!
Since last year, I’ve:
- rewritten a lot of the ship components – making the engines and maneuvering more realistic and customizable to work on all different ships,
- made more complex AI with goal setting and steering,
- implemented some moving origin capabilities to make the battlefields more expansive and allow for some seamless travel – still WIP,
- created the beginnings of a procedural galaxy generator that builds different galaxies and nebula and plots planet locations as well as assigning star types, planet types-based on distance from the star etc- and other details,
- created some new nebula types that can be randomized and colorized for more variation
- created and found some procedural substance textures for planets that work with Unity5 lighting and can be randomized for variation through the galaxy generator
- built a few new HDR space skyboxes
- made new cap ship models that should lend themselves to part swapping to make more type variations (more to come),
- new beam weapons and missiles,
- more complex turret AI that takes orders from its main ship AI to focus fire, target certain types or even fire at any targets of opportunity,
- more complex explosions that have multiple stages for bigger ships (still wip but already looking pretty cool)
- implemented a new radar and target tracking system connected it to the AI
- targeting now seamless allows for targeting whole ships or component pieces
- targeting all based on factions and classes instead of unity tags – more complex relationships and more advanced decision making for AI
- there is a new mission / battle editor that I worked on over the summer too – something I need to start revisiting soon.
Here is a recent video of some of the dogfighting action (hoping to get a cap ship video up soon too!)
