Student AI Trials

I've compiled some clips of the AI Game Programming class's attempts at docking with the station. Here's the video:

Maneuvering Thrusters

Because it's going to look really cool to have the student's AIs tomorrow thrusting the ship all over the place, I really wanted to see the maneuvering thrusters firing. So I started working on a particle emitter class which can do just that:

Here's a picture of the bow thrusters firing to slow the ship down. There will be thruster emitters placed all over the ship which will correspond to different maneuvers.

Small Features

After big pushes in development are completed (such as the AI dll prep that had been consuming me) I like to settle down and work on small features before starting on something big again.

This time I decided to touch up some simple UI stuff, as well as add a small feature to make motion more apparent.

First came the UI. I originally had a huge ugly progress bar that took up the center of the screen for scene loads. To replace this I made a stackable, unobtrusive progress bar system which allows progress bars to stack up on top of each other at the bottom of the screen. They're pretty in their simplicity and tiny-ness. Because they sit at the bottom they can be used to show loading in threaded subroutines without interrupting play. The fact that they stack means more than one process can display its progress at the same time.

I also touched up the graphics for the flight HUD, making the attitude indicator and warning lights much sleeker.

In order to make the player's ship's motion more apparent, I introduced a system which renders what is supposed to be specks of dust streaking past. This shows your overall direction of motion in a nifty way.

Above is a screenshot of the new flight HUD graphics. You can also see some of the streaks in the picture. They are very faint because I wanted to show the direction of travel without making it blatant.

Corona

I thought the current star rendering scheme was rather ugly (just rendering a sphere and letting the bloom shader but a little halo around it) and wholly unsatisfying. Not to mention unrealistic.

Since I'm giving the galaxy the little more attention this week I figured I'd write a quick shader to put a corona on the star. It's just a simple first-try, but it already makes the star look a lot more impressive than a full-bright white sphere.

The star is white because it's a product of the older version of the galaxy generator, which did not interpolate colors and just set them all to white. The shader also takes in the star color, but you can't see it here.

Star Coloring

In my mad rushes to complete large portions of the game for various school projects over the last year, the galaxy generator has kind of fallen by the wayside. Because it's such an important part of the game's concept, I'm going to be giving it a little more love in the days to come. Starting with stars.

I hadn't really given much thought to how to color stars initially, and they're all just generated as white regardless of their temperature. Using the table on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification) I created a gradient of colors which I can lerp between to find the color of each star based on its temperature. The range is from 3700K to 33000K. Anything above or below those limits just gets the end color.

The actual coloring for the rendering will be done in the star shader, which has yet to be started but should prove to be interesting to write.

Once I've got coloring done I plan to start work on generating the starfield skybox textures based on the player's actual position in the galaxy. The size and colors of the stars in the starfield will be representative of the color of the actual stars, as well as their distance from the current system.