Intro
Simply put, I live in Indianapolis. This means that, due to the Superbowl, my university has shut down and I have more time on my hands than in the past few weeks. I've used this to make up for lost time and implemented some features I've been planning for some time.
Space Clouds
Let's do the pretty stuff first. Although it is well known that, in nature, there are few gas clouds in space dense enough to be seen by the naked eye I have implemented them anyway. And I must say, I am impressed with my work so far.
My goal was to make nice nebula effects like those in Freelancer, and not those nasty nebula X3 has. This problem was solved by dropping particles throughout the entire volume of the nebula, meaning these are 3D and can be flown through. The nebula can be easily animated and modifying them is as easy as changing the particle sprite, life span, or the colors!
As you get closer to a nebula, fog effects will be used to give a sense of envelopment, and I will play with the lighting to make lightning and stuff. I also want to make more specific textures instead of this generic smokey texture.
Oh, and these aren't small objects. They are at least 1,000,000km across and have been known to be up to 1,000,000,000km across!
Trails
Engine trails got a massive overhaul because they share code with the nebula system. In order to make the nebula, I needed to load particle effects from data files. This feature also allows different engine trails to be specified for different ships. You can also have more than one engine trail on a ship, so with some clever hard-pointing you can have some neat ships.
Time Dilation
I have decided that many ships will be limited to subluminal speeds inside a solar system. These speeds may be about 2/3rds the speed of light for a fighter, which isn't as fast as it sounds. Space is really big, it takes over 8 minutes to cross the distance between the Earth and Sun at the speed of light, and that's only 150,000,000km!
I have implemented a speedup button which allows the game to be accelerated up to 10x. This gives your 0.66c fighter an effective top speed of 6.6c. This isn't an in-universe role-play thing like SETA from the X universe. This is just a speedup button which speeds everything up everywhere.
Music
I'm getting better at using LMMS to sequence tracks, and I have completed what I think will be acceptable combat music for Ageiran space. This is by no means final, so if you have comments please give them!
Conclusion
If you have questions, suggestions, or complaints (how dare you!) just send a message or leave a comment. I will be needing voice actors soon, so if you're interested in that let me know. As usual, if you're a modern day Mozart or the Da Vinci of 3D modeling and you want to help, you're welcome to help!
Fly safe.
Well this too a while to get authed lol.
if this is still in development I'd hope to see some gameplay motives from Dwarf-Fortress.
In an open-space game like that it could be interesting to roam the universe as a single guy or switch to an empire building mode withing the confine of the same game.
well, i'm sure your getting enough input from other backsit driver like myself, lol.
Goodluck anyway. :)