News

Hey Folks! Back at work for a few days, so I'm continuing work on the fusion control panel.

When I last left off, I had mostly figured out a layout I'm happy with. It has most of the bare-bones info and controls one would need to start and control a fusion reaction, though it should probably get fleshed-out a bit at some point. Fortunately, there's still room for some

Hey Folks! Fusion reactor control panel is shaping-up, and I've got a first draft that I'm fairly happy with.

While a little more effort went into research today as questions came up, most of the effort went into problem-solving the layout. I started by making sure all of the gauges and controls I expected were there, then ran through the pre-flight checklist to make sure each

Hey Folks! I started on the reactor control UI today, splitting time fairly evenly between research and layout. The fire-up sequence is one of the more important parts of the upcoming teaser, not to mention one of this game's design goals: satisfying and meaningful pilot controls.

Players should feel like they're Wash, powering-up the ship for a full burn, flipping switches

Hey Folks! Busy day today, as I shored-up the spark vfx and integrated it with repair actions in-game.

Early in the day, I finished tweaking the spark vfx to use the correct lens flare sprite, increased spark speed, and disabled collisions. The collisions were causing problems any time the AI was too close or turned in such a way that the vfx intersected a nearby object. And for how

Hey Folks! Made some decent progress today on some visual features which should help in the upcoming teaser.

First, I finished getting crew to sit correctly in ship equipment like toilets and nav stations. I ended up adding a new field to objects to store the current idle animation name, and allowed interactions to change that. This way, when the crew is awaiting a response from

Seeing a man about a horse. Dropping the kids off at the school. Whatever you call it, this is the grandeur of my work today.

It started off a bit more dignified, as I setup a sitting animation for using the ship's nav station. There's going to be a shot in the teaser where I need crew sitting at a console, so that was next on my list. After a bit of testing, though, I

Hey Folks! Notice anything unusual about today's screenshot? If you guessed "that's a Unity workspace," you're right!

As mentioned yesterday, I'm working on a tool to help record footage for the upcoming teaser video. And today's screenshot shows current progress. I've got the NEO Scavenger hexes loaded into Unity, randomly arranged in a map. I

Hey Folks! Not a lot of progress today, as quite a few interruptions and admin work got in the way.

What work I did manage to do, however, was for the upcoming teaser video. And today's image is a teaser for the teaser, so to speak. Joshua and I were chatting about possible scripts for the teaser, and I think we've settled on this establishing shot: we see NEO Scavenger hex

Hey Folks! I managed to make a pretty big optimization today to the renderer, as well as fix a few visual issues with the headlamp.

The headlamp was just finishing-up yesterday's work. I found and fixed the scaling and position issues for the sprite, and also hooked-up the sprite to the on/off code triggered when the helmet is donned/removed. Now, we get a nice little pin light

Hey Folks! More incremental improvements to lighting and rendering today, as we approach parity with the features we had with the older 3D system.

One of the most obvious differences today are what Unity calls "spotlight cookies." Basically, they're textures that mask the brightness of lights so you can add noise, patterns, and other details to the area a light touches.