Hey everybody. Flavien again for the last update until Keith his back ( I was mistaken last week, his return flight is actually… today, so he can’t do the update this week either ).
On the technical side, I was able to wrap up the last networking tests. Everything seems to behave pretty well even under relatively bad networking conditions ( packet drops, lag of 200+ milliseconds etc… ). I’ve started the integration step to the real game, however while doing so I detected more physics-related issues; in particular we seem to have a major performance issue where space stations ( which are composed of millions of triangles ) cause collision detection slowdowns despite being millions of kilometers away from where dynamic entities are.
Looking at the code it seems to be an issue with our 3rd-party physics library (ODE) taking a slow code path instead of the optimized one. I already have a fix in mind, so it shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to fix. In other news, bandwidth compression has been reimplemented and I’ve continued playing with some basic A.I. for missiles and auto-turrets.
Not much to report on the art side as everybody is busy continuing their work from last week; Kristian is wrapping up the factory buildings, while Dan and Jan have been working on the destroyer. They’re refining the global shapes and plating, here’s a WIP paintover ( lacking details since they’re not that far yet ):
Are the blue, glowy bits representing thrusters? If so, I like the idea of the main and retro thrusters being off to the side (presumably both sides), rather than having main engines on the back. Reminds me slightly of a fatter version of a ship from Starshatter (great game but unused potential), but I can’t remember which…!
Seems like factory guntower ended up looking like some mystical object in that second image. Here’s a shot that offers more understanding, like you can see its circular rail:
Looks a lot like a bar chair imho - might wanna give the horizontal supports/bars a smaller diameter to break that impression up a bit. And/Or have the vertical supports/bars change their steepness/angle mid height.
PS: Bar chair, and beer barrel right next to it. Cant unsee that.
Ok the pic on top of the ship in take-off position in the color photo looks like it is waving… in the gray photo it looks normal… WHY. (member; Neurotics Demanding Explanations.)
Does it matter that the struts are in the same place as on a stool?
I imagine the physics is the same so it makes sense that they’d be in the same place.
Wargrim: Looks a lot like a bar chair imho - might wanna give the horizontal
supports/bars a smaller diameter to break that impression up a bit.
And/Or have the vertical supports/bars change their steepness/angle mid
height.
We’ll take a look at this case in today’s dev meeting.
LucasFIN: Will there be any darker texture areas?
Two customizable paint layers for ‘industrial’ game objects. I would personally like to variate base metal (that’s the only thing you see atm) via vertex colors but art schedule is very tight. We’ll see.
Yeah, I figured it’s might be a scheduling issue. Might we see some upgrades on this area later once the game has shipped? Especially the big stations would benefit from that variation imo. For example some dark areas on indentations would bring some nice contrast.
