IronDuke's Space Game

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8 years 5 months ago #20011 by IronDuke
Replied by IronDuke on topic IronDuke's Space Game
Time for a wall o' text update again...

I've been working as much as I can on the game, but it's amazing how slowly things go when school is in session. :(

I've been playing around with that texture-based damage model (I should really use an acronym - TBDM :silly: ) some more, but there's a hitch. With Unity 5, a whole lot of awesome new stuff was added to the game engine. They also optimized it for speed, which meant removing support for dynamic concave mesh colliders. My TBDM requires that the collision mesh be exactly the same as the visible mesh, so currently it will only work on static objects.

There's good news though; a fella on the Unity forums is working on a custom physics engine to overcome the limitations of Nvidia's PhysX system. He calls it the "Articulated Physics Engine", or APE for short. Mostly he's focusing on joints, but I asked him to include support for concave rigidbody mesh colliders, and he said he would, popping out a video the next day. :cheer: It's on this page of his thread about it.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to have something that will enable me to implement a basic pewpew system, I'll just create a hitpoint system like that already in EoC - shot hits ship, deduct 250 points from 2000 point hull. A little more boring, but it's a placeholder for a placeholder for a placeholder - what's to be expected? :P

There's another pitfall; that physics engine is not likely to be cheap. I have extremely limited money, so I'm working on an additional Unity project which I hope to release soon that will provide funding for anything I have to buy to make my space game the best ever. The project is a pinball game that I've been working on lightly for the last year or so. One board is practically complete, and the code has been written to make additional boards a simple matter of adding scripts and setting variables. I could make thirty boards, all completely different, with different missions, and never code a single additional line. :) Two more boards will be added before it's complete, and I'm hoping it should sell enough to pay for APE and some other stuff I've got some eyes on.

A list of things that I want to include:
APE
Ceto - an advanced ocean system I'm planning to use on planets.
Sonicether's GI - a really REALLY cool GI solution for realtime; it's an image effect, so it is truly realtime. It's pretty exciting, since it will allow for GI inside a moving spacecraft, on moving planets, wherever.

Not much left to say, I think, except an apology for not posting this last week - I've had some computer woes and need a new wireless adapter soon. I may also have to replace the motherboard. :sick:

--IronDuke

Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. :)

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