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 fun from a programming point of view to write new things, I think there’s been a fair amount of untapped potential piling up, waiting for me to connect systems already written.
So: Planets now have a defence value which ticks up. Upon reaching a threshold, a planet destroyer + escorts are launched at the planet’s faction’s favored enemy. I’ve significantly reduced the range on the planet killing laser and reduced the fear of gravity wells for ships with weak thrust, so planet killers should no longer hover so far outside planet defence range, and less often get pushed out of the solar system by passing planets. I’ve also upped their thrust some. I think I might need to start attaching different drag values to different ships- I still want the planet killers to be slow and ponderous, but it’s a pain having them be constantly flirting with getting sucked into gravity wells just to be within laser range. Giving them more engine power but more drag would solve that problem without also messing with everything else in the game.
Planetary invasions are announced to the player on launch, as are attacks when they arrive. There will be some sort of a filter for this eventually so the player isn’t so omniscient, but that’s a gameplay issue to sort out at a later time.
I’ve also resolved some issues with invasions targeting the wrong planet. The difference between 1-based LUA and 0-based C++ indices still apparently gets me sometimes.
And finally, there is now a nice hum attached to the planet killer lasers, and they no longer visually penetrate the planet they’re hitting. I think lasers are probably my next target for visual revamp.