Starshatter Rearmed Mod

[lightgemini]

Nice videos there. You implemented a zoom feature, its pretty useful I like it. Last time on group vs group long range battle I felt there wasnt much to do while watching shots slowly fly both ways. Your changes to the torpedos seems to make the long range part quite interesting. If the behaviour of torpedos could be assigned by the player before launch it would open new gameplay on tactics.Autopilot modes are good ideas. The main thing is to teach AI to use its lateral thrusters. Functions to order it to fire up thrusters is there, it just needs a good logic to handle it.Shot speeds do looked moronic on those long range fights. I first would look cool but thinking it twice it isnt and eats performance a lot. I have started to increase speeds and although not intended, I see in the end the thing will settle down with quite faster shots and lower rate of fire making it feel more like an rts. Large fleet battles just cant cope with so much fire flying around for long.Other stuff is going good. Didabled ships messing the score was fixed quickly, pending campaign scoring, and stopped trying to reinvent the wheel with object spawning and simply used the already present function for creating debris. Now dead ships spawn a nice debris field around it. It needs a bit more work to keep good control of it so it doesnt get out of control and laggs the game and is done.Now I have a dilema. Theres now 2 dead states for ships, the vanilla big boom and delete, and the disabled dead-floating state. When should a ship end one way or the other? Its not a simple question to answer. Everybody likes big booms although its not quite realistic, but dead ships floating with debris all over make for more interesting scenery. Maybe merge the two? Im uncertain. Any good ideas would be welcome.

[lightgemini]

Since its been quite some time since last update and the mod has changed quite a bit since then, I uploaded a simple video to show the current state of the mod. a few lagg spikes wich are caused by the recording. Im leaving the disabled ship state for later. I will likely tie it to the reactor status were there will be a chance for the crew to shut it down before it goes nova and avoid having the ship explode. Some factors like reactor damage level may affect the outcome.

[lightgemini]

Now big impacts on ships spawn a bit of debris when the ship is low on health, to simulate it starting to fall apart into pieces. Under heavy bombardment it can look quite cool. Nailed down a bug that was making some flyby dust particles to remain stuck in the screen long after it should have faded away, and its running smooth now. Some nice art for it to use and it would be perfect. Splash damage is back, but toned down a lot. It has a limited radius around the exploding ship and should be no problem as long as you have your shields up or arent at point blank. We are reaching an acceptable point in killed ships fx and im going to call it done after some more testing to check theres no mayor problems. I would like to add custom debris models for this new feature, including dead crew floating in space, before releasing next patch. will see how it goes.

[lightgemini]

Hi there. Having an horrible week this time. Migrated to Visual Studio 2015 some days ago, got stashatter compiling fine and started to enjoy/explore new functionality and possible interesting extensions. Got doxygen to draw a code map of the project and all was going good. Then moronic VS2015 somehow managed to break on its own. Loaded an online teamplate and saw a glimpse of Boost extension being downloaded and installed. Then big misery started as VS refused to work anymore. Tried many fixes and uninstalling/installing and it got only worse. I cant for the live of me to make the goddamn thing to run again, not even to install properly again. To make it even funnier I cant load starshatter on the old VS2010 either, so im left out from keep coding. I tried to look for alternatives to VS to migrate there but havent found anything good. Im at a point of setting VS on fire and throwing it through the window, and watch it splatter and burn. The fact it is not a physical object I can interact with is sparing it from huge amounts of rage. Meanwhile Im packing the last build that I could compile before VS going full retard, together with the latest mod state and releasing it as version Beta7. Its got a glitch or two still to be fixed and laggs under some cases (even more than normal), but I dont know when I will manage to resume work. Its up and ready for download.

[lightgemini]

I managed to have VS2015 working again and things work fine again. I do like this new VS ir was worth the pain.I have the basic classes for handling asteroids and nebula/dust clouds. Now a grid of asteroidfield objects is created using simplex noise values, wich each one calls its own nebula object if needed.Heres a link to a short video showing how asteroid zones look now. Theres a lot to do but I like how is coming along.

[lightgemini]

Hi. This is turning into the biggest challenge I ever tried to do in this project so far. The vanilla game has been pushed beyond what it was made to handle a lot. I have been spending a lot of time learning about rendering with directx, handling collisions etc.First in order to have a playable game again, I made changes to the collision detection for ships and shots. Now the game can handle the inmense amount of shots and ships smooth and without lagg.Also tuned slighty rendering and particles to use proper transparency instead of the ugly bright blob, and keep z-fighting to a minimum.In work queue theres placing asteroids manually in the system .def files, New asteroid models with LOD, decent nebula artwork and transition, and more stuff that may or may not happen.I have settled to use the asteroid&nebula design of X-Rebirth. It may not be the best as a game but its art and scenery is quite good.