Engine restructuring complete!

After our short break, well, everyone except for Asael, engine restructure is now complete. Maybe infographics soon? Possibly more concept art and screenshots?

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Engine restructuring in progress....
Ask Aseal Temple about it...

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.