Lava Below, Trails Above news

Intro
So, you thought I was dead? Inside I was, finals are a horrible strain. They induce a level of stress and panic that is difficult to otherwise encounter. However, now that they're over and the ever-present fear of sleeping though an alarm, missing the final, and failing the class is gone, I have gotten back to work.

Engine Trails
When I played EVE everyone kept crying on CCP's forums for engine trails to return to the game. They are pretty, and they track the flight of a ship. I always wondered why CCP didn't have them until I realized they are a pain to implement. I had to rewrite large chunks of the game engine's particle system to get them working properly.

As you can see, the engine trail is made up of lots and lots of particles that have a smoke texture and always face the camera. 2000 particles can be deployed per ship per time, with an average of 1000 in existence per ship at any moment. Since this rapidly became a lesson in lag induction, I limited trail creation to only ships within guaranteed visual range in the same system as the player.

Missiles and ships both get engine trails, and the trails match the behavior of the ship (as you can see in the above first person shot of a missile firing). For example, if the ship speeds up the trail gets thicker, and when it slows down it gets thinner. The thickness of each particle in the trail is random within those constraints, which helps the tail look realistic (not a perfectly smooth line of yellow).

Redone Planets
I found a nice website that generates terrestrial planet textures of an arbitrary size using fractals. That lava world was generated using that site. However, more importantly, that site led me to a mathematical way to procedurally generate planet textures, and I hope to implement that before release (that way I don't have to ship any textures!). I have to figure out the internals of how JME3 stores image data, then I can write an algorithm to generate these textures on the fly.

For now, I've merely generated and stored the textures. In addition to redoing planet textures I have also added some skyboxes and improved existing ones. Solid white bloom inducing nebulas are gone! You'll thank me later.

Tactical Sensor
I decided to drop the Freelancer-esque list of all ships near you in favor of using HUD icons exclusively. I have reclaimed that screen space as a tactical window that shows the name, ship type, faction, shield status, hull status, and distance of a target. Just zoom in on one of the screenshots and look at the lower right display. You'll also notice that the targeted object's HUD indicator is enlarged.

Cheat Codes
The game is taking shape enough that I can't easily test things anymore without wasting lots of time, so I added some cheat codes. If you want to know what they are, you'll have to read the source code on release :) .

Conclusion
If you have any questions or comments let me know! I think I've gotten a lot done here so far, but I won't have an alpha to release for a while. I still need to implement NPC combat so that the AI can actually fight back. I don't feel like releasing even a demonstration build before then. Fly safe!