A significant update today-
I’ve retextured the basic projectiles to look more interesting. I’ve also modified the XML to be able to dynamically load a texture for projectiles instead of requiring an index number to an internal array, so adding new textures for new projectiles is trivial. I did that for the ships a while ago, but I guess I missed the projectiles.
I’ve added a mouse-over system. Hover the cursor over a planet, and you see it’s name and faction. Hover over an enemy ship, and you see it’s name, faction, and a bar for health. Hover over a star to see it’s name.
I’ve added the ability to claim planets. It’s just a “claim” button you can bring up with “e” while landed right now, I’m not totally sure how it will work from a gameplay perspective yet. I don’t think it’s reasonable for the player to be able to run around claiming every unpopulated planet for free, so there will probably be a resource cost, or the player will have to escort a colony ship from an established planet, or something along those lines.
Unclaimed planets spawn an endless stream of ships, just to showcase the new ability for LUA to easily spawn ships on demand. I’ll tie ship spawning and which faction the ships belong to to the planet’s defence level in the next update.
There’s now a “planet update” function in LUA, called for every planet every half second, to process things like mining, ship spawning, factories, and whatever else planets might do. Automatically called, timed scripts really extend the power of scripts, so I’ll be adding more in the future.
Lastly, a bar on the lower right indicates the current charge for the gravity tool.
So, for next time:
A planet upgrade menu. All the mining and factory data is in place, the player just needs an interface to get at it. The button is there, but is not currently hooked to anything.
A satellite defence system for planets. The player can’t be expected to be everywhere, so planets will need to be able to fend for themselves to some degree. Also, taking a hostile planet by force should be a significant undertaking, so it needs to be able to fight back. It’s probably something the player should only be able to do later on in the game, so I’ll probably have planets be immune to normal attacks, and add some special, expensive tool for sieging planets.