Author Archives: Alex

Radar added, text back in

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Alex

Well, the radar is in.  Dealing with the necessary projection matrix transformation to make it display right was a bit of a pain, really.  The actual transformation is basically only three lines of code, and they don’t even look that … Continue reading →

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Thoughts about the new direction

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Alex

I’ve been thinking about other space-based, sandboxish games set in large universes.  Privateer, freelancer, X3.  Maybe I can have the player set up bases on planets.  Some planets are worthless, some are good for mining, and some are good for … Continue reading →

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A fundamental change to the direction of the game

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Alex

Today’s version is a major revision.  I’ve decided not to go musical.  More strategic.  Larger in size.  With gravity and planets and bases and maybe convoys and a UNIVERSE.  I’ve got a vision, it’s partially inspired by this game I … Continue reading →

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AI and better looking enemies

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Alex

Well, three basic AI modes are in.  I feel stupid even calling it “AI”.  It’s… behaviour.  The ships follow the player around, it’s not like it’s a thinking robot. Anyway.  Mode one: It chases the player.  There is acceleration in … Continue reading →

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Weapondata.txt

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Alex

I’ve worked a bit on AI recently.  It’s not in there, but almost!  (Of course, I’m talking about very basic ship movement AI here).  The data structures are in place and initialized, the ship update function is being called, I … Continue reading →

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Text- more difficult than you’d think

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Alex

Rendering text in OpenGL ends up being much harder than I thought it was.  It seems like such a fundamental thing, but it took me a while to really believe that there isn’t native functionality to do it.  I tried … Continue reading →

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Shockwave weapons

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Alex

I didn’t do what I planned on doing, but I did do a shockwave weapon.  When I first saw the shockwave in action, it suddenly felt a lot more like a game. The keys, updated: 1 for normal projectile (I’ve … Continue reading →

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Timer scheduling, dangerous lasers and some low-end animation

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Alex

Updates with this edition: Lasers now destroy ships as they should, and if they hit multiple ships, they only destroy the closer one, not whichever was spawned first.  Of course, I haven’t plugged in any damage values yet, so everything … Continue reading →

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Laser textures

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Alex

You may have noticed previous versions did a weird ugly thing when you overlapped something transparent with something semi-transparent.  I was using a slightly incorrect alpha blend function (there are about 15 to choose from), I have fixed that.  I’ve … Continue reading →

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Laser beams

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Alex

To do explosions, I need to have a way of having a list of things to do in the future.  I knew I was going to have to do this eventually, but it seems tricky to do in a really … Continue reading →

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