Category Archives: State of the Game

I’ve been working on putting everything together.  Fixing up placeholders like the spawning of ships being unrelated to planet position in LUA, attaching notifications to planetary invasion events, attaching sounds to planet lasers, that sort of thing.  While it’s more … Continue reading →

The significant new update is the addition of dust and, in general, an efficient way to track particles floating through space. It would be an easy problem, if I didn’t require the dust particles to react to external forces. Until … Continue reading →

I have finished the notification system, so important events are now announced to the player.  Currently this includes when a friendly planet launches an attack or when any planet is conquered.  While implementing the ability to save messages, I also … Continue reading →

I suspended work on the game for a while, but I’m back, and progress continues, with a substantial list of updates. Additional player weapons are re-enabled, switch weapons using the mouse wheel. The number keys still work, but may be … Continue reading →

New this update is the addition of defence satellites.  Their stats are defined in their own XML file, and they’re plugged into the world through universe.xml, in the appropriate planet entry.  They fire on enemies of their home planet’s faction. … Continue reading →

Saving functionality is complete.  All ships, projectiles, gravity walls, and of course the player have save and load functions which slot themselves into the relevant XML in the appropriate save directory, and restore themselves appropriately on load.  Which is, I … Continue reading →

While writing the LUA “planetTick” function, I came to the conclusion that requiring modification of the C++ core to add new kinds of data to planets runs counter to the premise of user modifiability.  So I’ve added an “extra data” … Continue reading →

A significant recent addition to the game is “gravity walls”.  The mouse right and left click weren’t doing anything, and I wanted to do something with the precision of the mouse cursor besides use it as an aiming device, and … Continue reading →

I’ve added in some more projectiles using the new system, and added in a fragmenting, shotgun-style effect.  The player starts with seven weapons now, bound to keys 1-7.  1-3 are the same as always, 4 homes, 5 is a spread, … Continue reading →

Trails are done.  Positions are tracked in memory, but most of the work calculating the trail shape is done in shaders. I’ve given enemy ships trails too.  Zooming out when there are a lot of them around is now more … Continue reading →