New in this version:
Added a universe system. Separate “galaxies” maintained with their own individual stars, planets, ships, and projectiles.
Added wormholes, to travel between galaxies. Travel zeroes out any projectiles you left behind, but the enemies will be right back where you left them when you go back. That’s probably not how I’ll leave it, but I don’t want them to just disappear, either.
Added shader versions of emitters in-game. I use rendermonkey, a free ATI tool to write and preview shaders, to write and tune them. It’s not a fully-featured IDE, but it’s not bad. Check the .vs or .fs files for the actual shader code. They’re based on (but almost entirely rewritten) the particle emitter demo that comes with rendermonkey. The player’s rocket exhaust and the wormholes are both shader emitters now. I might change wormholes to the old CPU version of emitters, since that gives me so much more control over particle behaviour.
Added a rocket trail to the player’s ship.
Explosions will also look a little nicer, thanks to exploring the different blend modes a bit.
One thing I’m thinking about now is how to improve the radar. The problem is, the radar should be pretty short range for the enemy ships, where you don’t care about the ships super far away, but it also needs to be long range for stars, which have big gravity wells and will kill you if you accidentally smack in to one. As it is now, I think you can actually be inside a star’s gravity well without it even showing up on radar. So, do I :
Zoom the radar out? Then it would be kind of useless for enemies nearby, they’d all look like they were right on top of you.
Add a second radar, one just for planets? Two radars seems a bit excessive. A radar and a galaxy map, maybe?
Add the planet/star data to the outer ring of the radar, maybe growing in size as they get closer? At least it wouldn’t be a second radar, and you’d at least be able to tell what DIRECTION stars and planets are in, but it would be hard to communicate how far away they are.
I guess the radar where it is, and a map on the upper right, is what I’ll probably do. Then I can take the stars and planets out of the radar, which is probably for the best.
So, for next time: Maybe a map in the upper right. Maybe some new weapons. Maybe I’ll finally stick some LUA in there, probably on planet landing, so I can start scripting up some quests.