Stellar Squadron Windows, Mac, Linux game

In our last post, we introduced procedurally generated carriers which led to the logical next step... Destroying procedurally generated carriers.

Since developing the procedural generation process it has been further extended to include customizable colours, new varieties of some parts and new turrets, see below for examples:

As carriers are significantly larger than our starfighters an alternative approach was developed to eliminate them by first triggering a multi-stage explosion. The multi-stage explosion is a series of explosion effects instantiated at random over the surface of the carrier. They are placed by initially casting rays from the circumference of an imaginary sphere whose diameter is large enough to envelop the carrier in its entirety, where the rays encounter collisions with the surface of the carrier explosion prefabs are instantiated. There is a timed sequence ensuring that numerous explosions are placed over a period at an accelerating rate.

At the end of this sequence a dramatic final explosion, complete with super-nova occurs and ultimately the carrier itself is dissolved out of existence. The dissolving is achieved using a shader which manipulates both the material and geometry of the carrier, the material displays bright glowing cinders over the surface and the geometry is spherically inflated from the carrier's centre giving the illusion of an expanding explosion. At the latter stages of the shader's animation texels are progressively made transparent eventually leading to the disappearance of the carrier. Some fiery visual effects, lighting and a supernova provide the finishing touches for where we are today:

There may be further work to come in destroying carriers but we will be focusing on bugfixing and polishing for a time before then.