It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I’ve been working on a few things since the last time I posted, and I just wanted to tell/show you what I’ve been doing, so that you don’t think I’ve died or something.

Basically, I’ve been taking advice from various people and thinking about how on Earth I can make the game fun-er-er. The first rather easy fix I did was add mouse**control to the game, so that you can have a little bit more of an intuitive and precise control of your ship. Rolling is still controlled the way it was before, but pitch has been reverted to mouse, as well as the addition of yaw** so that you can be even more precise with your ship! Yay precision.

The biggest problem I saw when I was watching people play was general spatial confusion; players had no idea where they were, or where anyone else was. This is a pretty “easy” fix with the addition of a map. The problem came in that most maps are two dimensional, and my playing space is three dimensional. Thankfully, someone had already thought of this, and now I have a wonderful 3D Minimap to add to my game.

The last big problem I had was that AI agents only did one thing: chase. They always chased you, and nothing else. I wanted to add something that let AI do other things, like run away, so that I could spice up the battles with some variety in behaviour. This part is still ongoing for a large part, but I’m adding improved AI to help cater to this. I’ll post a technical right after this to explain how I’m doing that, but for here, suffice to say that it’s pretty nifty.

Anyway, here are some pix.

The minimap! I should also mention that I changed the ships to first person perspective because the reticule in third person was too misleading. I’ll work on the aesthetic part later. For now, I’m getting functionality down.

It’s a little hard to tell in this picture, but there is a targeting system now which lets you not only target someone, but shows a leading reticule so that you know where to shoot in order to hit.

This update is not released yet, but I just wanted to show you all what’s up in the world of Starfire! Woo!