Thursday, October 6, 2011

Slowly...

Work, healt and other things are against me & tau ceti so no more news since june.
But no news is not no progress...
In these periods i've worked for improve the consistency of the engine.

Here the most important news

- Now coordinates of the universe are the same of the 3d engine. This means that i cannot use anymore realistic large scale for the universe, but i've seen that the "real thing" is for now too big (and boring). To reach a planet from another you needs lots of minutes, and i'm developing a game, not a simulator. The pros are that now shadows are more accurate.
- The internal structure of the object now is totally hierarchical, so Sun has 9 child, one of this is Earth. Earth has one child, Moon. Moon has one child: Space station (i.e.). If i move the Sun, i move also earth/moon/station automatically.
- I've started to update the look'n'feel of the gui.
- Now your starship can shoot, and i've implemented the collision detection. So if you hit another ship with your beam, the program can tell you "boom" and give the distance of the collision. It works also with complex object, and not unsing only AABB (bounding box) but with geometry.. so if you shoot at the center of a torus, the function return "false".
- You can attach a camera to any ship, so in future you'll be able to say the point of view of a enemy.
- Space station now has a (primitive) tunnel to help you in landing operations.
- LOTS of cleaning up.