Looking good, reminds me of freelancer. Still not entirely convinced about the ponies though.

Long time no update of coding status. Will post no visuals today, only some internal stuff:
Had to rewrite the quest class - the third time. Now the quest class is able to handle several items in parallel, for example flying to a nebula mining crystals and selling them on another planet. This was important for telling the story. Waypoints can be set in the quest steering files, too. See an example here:



Looks a bit static, but I have not so very much experience with quest engines - anyway, it works.

Next big item is and was writing a story. I just finished the 5th quest story for the pirates and translated 4 already to English. If I manage to write and translate every day one quest, I'm going to finish the story until deadline.

Started to implement sound. Usually I wanted to give OpenAL a try, but I have no time to search for a good tutorial or example code for an easy implementation. So I used my old FMOD examples. The problem with FMOD on Linux is, you have to copy it to /usr/local/bin - its not possible (or I do not know how) to make a sandbox variant. But as far as I remember, there will be no problem on Win32, the DLL can be placed next to the executable of the game.

Last big item was creating some more meshes (unfortunately without textures - hats off to all the professionals making textures the whole day long). The player now sits in a different cockpit, if he buys a new spaceship (remember Privateer 1?).

I try to make a video with sound, if some more sounds are implemented. But I can tell you: Firing the railgun with 600 rounds per minute rocks!

See you in space
XDigital

Again no visuals from the game but a short source code extract. I started to implement the control law. Usually I wanted to use a genetic algorithm to imitate pilots behaviour. Seems to be rather difficult, cause I have to define several limiters and functions (e.g. thrust increases only with delay to max thrust). What you see in the screenshot is the simple version of the Control Law, which will be part of the final game, if I fail with the genetic algorithm. Any clue, how to make the AI shoot? I thought of ray tracing...

The game looks great so far.. I just have to say that, I don't know if you're planing to use it in the final release, but ship strafing just doesn't look so realistic.. I mean.. You know, usually the engine faces forward and pilots jaw in order to turn left/right.. (just my opinion)

Quote: Original post by experiment
The game looks great so far.. I just have to say that, I don't know if you're planing to use it in the final release, but ship strafing just doesn't look so realistic.. I mean.. You know, usually the engine faces forward and pilots yaw in order to turn left/right.. (just my opinion)

On that note, I suggest that if there is to be ship "strafing" that it be implemented with something like the RCS jets that are on contemporary spacecraft. That way you could "strafe" up and down as well, which is something you might want to look into since its a space game...

(disclaimer, haven't seen the videos yet)

"Strafing" is included in any direction. Usually I wanted to copy the dog fights from Battlestar Galactica. Remember the scene, where they attacked the resurrection ship? But I'm still not sure, if the AI can move in a similar way like the player. This control law is somehow difficult and I do not want to implement more ODE's. The swarm engine eats so much performance...

Idea for shooting:



again, I have to loop through all spacecrafts :(
why do I have such less knowledge about multi core or shader usage. If one spaceship could be handled by one core/shader, performance could be increased by factor 100 *sigh*...

back to work.

You could find the enemy which is within firing range and closest to your ray, then orient the craft on that enemy.

Finding and orienting is all done by the swarm-engine together with the control law. But - implementing all this raises one of the things, I really hate: somehow you made a mistake in the architecture of the code and it takes more time to fix this, than to rewrite everything...
I descided to do the latter one. I know, time is running, but the enemies have to act correct, otherwise it is more or less "deer hunter" in space. Frack, I need vacation to finish all this.

...ok - due to severe influenca coding status has a delay of nearly one week. Have to skip the control law. Libertine will be a simple skeet shooting :( I hopefully find some time to finish the 2nd storyline.

Find a first release below. It is LINUX/Ubuntu only (maybe it is possible to run on other distribs, never tried it). No package dependancy included, you have to install FMOD and glut by yourself.

Start playing the pirates storyline and make use of your Logbook (F6).

Enjoy (if you are able to start...)!

http://myfreefilehosting.com/f/db199aeb1b_55.5MB

If influenca isn't some latin word for government influence, I got bad sick too.
Good luck in the contest.