Monthly Archives: August 2010

Emitter designer, now with actual emitter stuff going on

Well, the emitter code is in, and you can now play with actually spraying particles around.  I’ve included a sample of what you can do by messing with the color values.  It’s a little inefficient, though, if you spawn a … Continue reading

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Emitter designer

First a little background: If you aren’t familiar with what an emitter is, it’s something that spits out a bunch of semi-transparent images (individually called particles).  You set a bunch of rules about how the particles behave, maybe set up … Continue reading

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Planets

Planets are in.  You can land on them.  Land hard enough, and there will be an explosion and a HP penalty (though there is no penalty for losing all your HP).  Most planets have too much gravity to take off … Continue reading

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Radar added, text back in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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