The story elements that I was working on are now basically done.
There were quite a few last minute bugs, but these were solved with no major issues.
The next goal will be to create dynamic or randomly generated stories that will be different each time, possibly depending on the players character profile and/or their previous choices in the game.
I have now basically finished the Alpha-10 milestone, and will shortly move on to Alpha-11.
The story improvements that I am have been working on are going very well.
I have a short, functional, “side quest” style story that is randomly generated and works very well.
I still have quite a lot of testing and debugging to do with this though. I had to make some changes to the fundamental game code to make it work.
The gravity issues are mostly solved.
I had planned to add the ability for the player to control the orientation of their jetpack in all axes (So, they can move and rotate along any axis), but this proved to be more difficult than I thought, and I don’t have time to do this right now.
Instead, the player will automatically rotate so that they are standing on the object, regardless of what their world orientation is.
I have also added the ability for an object to have “artificial gravity”, which orients the player vertically. With this turned off, the player will be facing toward the center of the object, which can cause them to appear to be slightly slanted when entering doors, etc.
There is still some work to be done on this, but it is going reasonably well.
The setup of the artwork is done, and most of the preliminary work for the new story elements is also working.
It is now possible to land on any kind of stellar object, even if it is rotating.
The visual impact of having players walking around on a rotating asteroid or space station is extremely striking.
I am still having some issue adding correct gravity code. I want the players up direction to be vertical, so that they can enter buildings and open doors without being slanted at an angle, however, I also want the player to be able to walk around the entire asteroid, including underneath it, which would require the up vector to change.
I am still working on this.
The artwork that I have been working on is mostly done.
It’s quite simplistic at the moment, but the main goal is to test the ability for players to land on very small asteroids and structures which don’t have gravity.
I also want to have these objects rotate while the player is attached to them, and this is functionality that I have not yet added.
I have finished most of the smaller items that I wanted to create. I think the art quality is reasonably good, but not great. For the early stages of the project, it should work ok though.
The next step is to create a much larger , much more complex, art piece which I want to combine into one of the games dynamic stories.
At the moment, most stories are simple, but in future, I intend to add much more complex dynamic stories, when I get more time.
I have added an atmospheric reentry effect to the project, which I think looks very good. It activates during reentry to planets with atmospheres.
In addition to looking good, it also helps to cover the transition from space to surface, such as the lighting and other effects.
I have also finished most of the current tests, and added some last minute improvements to the project.
The next goal is to work on some artwork and new story elements.
I have made additional improvements to the AI.
It is now possible to permanently save the AI state to the database.
This means that the state of the AI can be restored after a server crash, or planned maintenance, etc. It also makes testing and debugging easier.
I have also made several improvements to the AI system, and fixed additional bugs.
