News

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours was pretty busy, though not terribly exciting. Usual family/house stuff.

Back at work, I had a bunch of admin stuff to take care of, then I was off to fix the gas dynamics performance. Last week, I noticed a big chunk of the framerate drop in complex scenes was due to gas dynamics. Specifically, the gas exchanges between rooms were being

Hey Folks! Our 2-day vacation was a big success. Not a single computer screen for the duration. Fresh sea air, mountain hikes, good food...really nourishing stuff. I should probably do that more than once or twice a year :)

Back at the office, I was able to add transponder range culling to the plotter pretty quickly. Assuming they have a range of about 20 million km (20Gm), we cull

Hey Folks! Some pretty significant improvements to the plotter today, plus derelict spawning fixes, and scanner research. And a heads-up that I'll be OOO tomorrow and Thursday.

First order of business was to get the derelict spawning to honor radial limits instead of cartesian ones, so we could spawn around a thing in a circle. You can see that in today's screenshot, where we

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. We went to the zoo one day, and painted ceilings another. Plus we gorged ourselves on pho, which I think did wonders for our recouperation. Not a bad weekend at all!

Back at the office, I resumed working on local maneuvering via RCS. Early in the day, I actually stumbled across an optimization that made a pretty huge difference in the orbital

Hey Folks! Aspredicted, family sickness has spread to me, and I'm running a bit ragged today. Still managed to get some work done, though, despite the head fog.

Most of today was getting the finer points of RCS mode rendering working, as it's a bit like course-plotting, but just different enough to warrant different branches of code. First order of business was to get

Hey Folks! Another short dev day today, I'm afraid. Family still a bit sick, so I spent some time with the toddler to give mom a break. Mom's getting a bit better, thankfully. But I have a feeling my turn is coming...

Anyway, I did manage to get a fair amount done on RCS thruster controls. Today's screenshot shows a few new UI widgets to help. Namely, the NAV MODE toggle

Hey Folks! Early devlog today, as the family's a bit under the weather, and needs some TLC.

I was able to grab a copy of Michael's latest work, which you can see in today's screenshot: the build queue. He's been working on a way to assign jobs anonymously on a ship, and the AI would pull jobs from that list when able.

For now, he has a hammer icon in the

Hey Folks! Making pretty good progress with the orbital plotting UI.

After a bit of hemming and hawing, I decided to retrofit the old UI rather than remake it. I was starting to run into issues in the new version by trying to mix mesh sprites with canvas drawing, which was mainly to try and speed-up rendering.

However, there are some tricks I can use to speed-up an all-canvas

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. It was beautiful out here, and we accordingly spent a good amount of time outdoors. Some brush clearing, some playing with the toddler, and a nice afternoon sit with some drinks. And it's having a pronounced effect on my mood, so I think there was definitely some seasonal affective disorder going on. Time to start walking more!

Back at

Hey Folks! Still looking into an alternate nav console rendering technique, and it's starting to come together. What's more, it also seems easier to manipulate. So far, anyway.

Today's screenshot shows a few scenes from the new nav renderer, which uses sprites to render planet/moon blips, and vector lines to draw their orbits. The main reason for this investigation is