Since it's been a while and I've been fairly quiet, I'll post a little progress update, but first, a teaser on combat:
I'm starting to mess around with combat and stuff, so here's a horrible vid of shooting lazors at another (one of our own empires) ships.
forgive the blank space, not sure why OBS recorded the non record able portion of the screen or whatever.
Just to give some scale, those laser beam "packets" are traveling at lght speed.
Lasers won't be able to actually get to this range, I'll add dispersion/attenuation or something.
It's also not yet actually hitting and doing damage yet, that's next.
The ships are moving, planets are orbiting, though at 1s time increments you don't notice it this zoomed out.
Recently I've had a couple of people helping out with some stuff, so there's been a few UI improvements here and there.
I've reworked the cargo storage and transfer code, it's now a bit simpler and easier to program around, I was trying to avoid it, because I thought it would add too much complexity, however I ended up adding volume restrictions to cargo storage, so it's now restricted by volume rather than mass, which means you'll need to watch your mass when setting up cargo runs of heavy materials and that your design has got enough DeltaV to change your orbit to a stable one once you drop out of Alcubierre space.
The transfer UX still needs some work, but this is how it looks now:
You have to be within a given DeltaV to transfer cargo between entities.
We've now got a handful of Newtonian movement orders to make that stuff a bit easier:
Some of those don't quite work yet,
Manual thrust allows you to just input a thrust vector to change your orbit that way.
Hohmann Transfer allows you to select anther object within the same SOI, and it'll attempt to match orbits with it.
Phase Change allows you to select an angle to advance your position on your current orbit. it'll raise or lower your apoapsis so you catch up or fall back, then bring you back to circular.
Had a hell of a time getting the High DeltaV intercept work, I've put that on the back burner for now, I'll have to come back to it soon though since that's what missiles will have to use.
PorkChop doesn't yet do anything at all other than being a button.
I've also fixed some of that fuzzy text you can see in the images since they were taken.
22367rh has started doing some work on streamlining the orders ui, currently we can't yet set up orders to continually grab cargo from one colony and dump it at another, which is our more immediate goal in that space.
As mentioned before, I'm starting to work on combat, there's little bits of it done here and there, there is some code to deal damage, we've got code to fire weapons as you can see, but I need to glue these bits together and tidy it up.
We're getting closer and closer to something that I'd consider a 'playable' alpha. yeah I know it's been a long time, and I've been at this for years, a lot of learning has been done and it's been a slow slog, but progress *has* been made, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.
IRL I've got some work coming up that will restrict the amount of time I'll be able to work on this, but hopefully it won't make me so tired that I don't have any motivation to work on this during downtime.