News

Hey Folks! Making more progress on the alternate lighting engine today.

Yesterday's work got basic light rays drawn on the screen, which appeared to cast shadows on random blocks placed around the scene. Not a bad start, but one of the next things I wanted to check was whether this actually scaled up to many lights/shadow casters or not.

The short answer was "no.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Pretty smooth sailing here, though the air is getting a bit chilly.

Today was a bit shorter than usual, due to a parent teacher conference this morning. So once I got back to the office, I decided to tackle something a bit different: lighting/line-of-sight rendering.

As some of you may recall, I've been through a few iterations of

Hey Folks! Finished some features today, and had a cool micro story to share as a result.

In today's gif, we see Ian docking his salvage pod to a derelict. He starts in his airlock, and crosses the gangway into the darkened derelict. We can see discarded EVA suits, scrap, and loose items on the ground. Then, using his drill to cannibalize some conduits from elsewhere on the

Hey Folks! Finally got the wall salvage interactions done, and made a few bug fixes before starting work on a missing room feature.

I figured out that placement bug from yesterday. It turns out that the loot generated by salvaging starts at tile 0,0, floating in space (i.e. not part of a ship), and as the game tries to place loot on existing stacks, it picked up those floating pieces

Hey Folks! Work continues on item stacking, and expanding various loot systems to use it.

The big change today is getting mode switching to support lists of new items instead of a single new item. E.g. having a wall convert into a damaged wall plus a list of scrap parts when it receives a "damaged" interaction, whereas before it could only change from "wall" to

Hey Folks! Almost there with the stacking feature. I've actually got loot spawning into an area and stacking correctly, it seems. And now we're down to edge cases and other ways loot appears in the game.

Continuing yesterday's work, I ended up making several changes to item stacking and unstacking. Unsurprisingly, more than a few errors were made along the way in my first

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. It was pretty much wall-to-wall for us, between household maintenance and a trip to the zoo with the little one. Hardly feels like we relaxed at all!

And in keeping with that momentum, I decided to tackle stacking items today :)

I'm pretty sure I'm going to need stacking at some point, so I dug into the code. And as predicted

Hey Folks! Took a bit of an art and research break today, focusing on adding components and scrap to the game.

Now that we're starting to use tools to break down ships, and ships can receive damage, I thought it made sense to add items to represent some of the smaller pieces that result from each. We have loose components that can be removed and reinstalled elsewhere (or sold), but

Hey Folks! A few new additions today, plus a bunch of clean-up, fixing, and streamlining.

First on the list was to remove orphaned placeholders when the person installing them changed their mind. Previously, ghost items would just be left wherever if the AI got interrupted, but now those ghost items are cleaned-up. I also noticed that installing items on dark ships was hard due to using

Hey Folks! Pretty productive day, today. I managed to get part installation working, as well as some fixes and cleanup done.

It turns out I was actually pretty close to a working system yesterday. I just needed two things.

First, I needed to make sure the installation interaction kept track of the old vs. new installed item correctly. Second, I added a new field to interactions