Friday, April 22, 2011

Autopilot and Stardust.



Now the autopilot works well: you select your destination with the mouse,  then the autopilot aligns your ship with the target, thrust the engine until you've made an half of the voyage, and finally brake near the destination... there's something to refine but it works!
I've also added "stardust" to give more depth to the starship speed.. the dust is white for now: i've choose this colour so you can see it into the low-resolution video :). Now it looks like the old Braben's game "Frontier"
I'm thinking how to brake the ship.. using the inertial behaviour is a bit annoying: you've to align the ship to the current speed direction and brake.. if you brake too much the ship moves backward (you can see it at the end of the video), and if you do not align well you create some side movement. In one phrase: it's very difficult to stop a ship manually using an inertial engine.
So it should be less realistic but more usable a brake that doesn't changes the speed direction but his lenght. If i divide the x,y,z component of speed by i.e. 1.01, i don't need to align the ship to brake and i can make some more complex maneuvers...

Happy easter to everybody.

1 comment:

Deimos said...

Dai che passo dopo passo, post dopo post vedo profilarsi un gran giocone !