Chinese Ships

Introducing the concept art for the Chinese factions ships, drawn by Zeck Donahue, our lead designer/artist.

Collision detection against rays to circles

After toiling for a little while, I came up with a pretty nifty method for detecting when our beams hit against a circle hit box. The method involved solving the y = mx + b equation of the beam, and then taking the normal equation of that that passes through the center of the circle. Then through some algebra manipulation you solve for when the two are equal, which then lets you easily solve for y. Once you have this, you essentially know how close the beam is to the circle, make a simple check against the length of the radius, and in 6 lines of code you know if you have a collision.

XBox 360 integration

After hours spent hours figuring out some xbox360 specific stuff, a few more hours integrating it into the game, and little optimizing, here is our first screen shot from the 360 with a ship that you can drive and a laser that does damage. I took out the call to Ryder's collision loop that only slowed everything down allot since it isn't used for anything at the moment . I also found that reducing the frequency of checks on a laser beam to about 6 per second does a good job at boosting frame rate as well.

Collision Detection

is hard...
that is all

Smart Asteroids

I am forced to remember the mimic ships from HomeWorld Cataclysm as the first asteroid I create flies away with shocking speed. The lesson of today is.. Asteroids dont need ship AI.

HUDs need lines

One thing that has really bothered me about XNA is the lack of simple shape primitives like lines, circles and whatnot. So while I was thinking of interfaces and HUDs, I realized I could no longer avoid this issue. An hour later I have perfected my simple custom line class! Its basically just a simple single pixel distortion trick that no one should be proud of, but I dont care, its fuckin cool, because XNA didnt have it, and now it does.

Also, as mentioned earlier, got a simple HUD up, with the help of my new lines.

PS: With how useful and awesome these lines are, it makes me think I should start posting the source of some of these useful custom classes I am creating for other people to use out there!

first ship & screenshot

I guess its kinda messed up to have this blog about a game in development without any concept art or screenshots. So here is an image of the fist ship in the game.
Its a US fighter. It is currently constructed of only 7 components, 4 hull sections, 1 crew section, 1 engine, and 1 base. I have no clue whether this will be in the final game, but its good enough for the testing purposes I need it for now. Below is a in-game screenshot with a lined blueprints of the ships components.

Any of you who have ever played a certain real-time full 3d strategy game will recognize this particular ship ;D