Debris Field

SpaceFlight.zip

New download. This will be the cumulative package from now on, until it starts to get too large.

The planet is now appropriately larger.

I have accepted the flight controls for now, and have moved on to other things. One of the things I didn't like was that when you were simply flying along, without doing any steering, the painted starfield doesn't move. To try to compensate for that, I have added 10,000 pieces of floating debris. These are small objects that are there to help indicate motion.

Next, I changed the algorithm for asteroid placement. Currently, it is back to being randomly located, clustered around the planet. Also, (if you look at the currently very ugly code) I am maintaining a list of pointers to each asteroid. This allows me to go back during the run loop and update rotational data for each one. If you get a good look at the asteroids you will see that they are all now spinning in space as well. I have no plans on adding rotational vectors to the debris objects, however.

One other thing. If you press the e key, you will be rotated to point in the direction of the planet, and all thrust vectors are zeroed. This allows you to then add a bit of forward thrust, and will fly you back to the planet.

Upcoming plans: Map locations for the planet and asteroids. Read geometry, texture, and locational data from a .csv file and insert them into the scene graph based on this data.

Once I am able to recreate the same system every time based on .csv file entries, it will be time for a refactoring of the code. Get rid of extra crap, and start breaking parts of it out into modules to ease readability.

After that will be collision detection.

If anyone is reading this and wants to help brainstorm ideas for what the user interface should look like, I would certainly love to hear it. I am looking for the 2D overlay on top of the scene graph should look like. Things to include: Simple map of the current system, a radar display of some sort, a simple ship health overview (top view and side view, most likely), some clickable control buttons, and whatever else you may think is needed. Once I get some ideas rolling, I will put something up, even if it starts out as completely non-functional. It will be good to see how the interface "plays" on top of the scene graph.