Yes, I am still alive!

I realize I have disappeared for the past few days.  No, I have not been binge drinking laying around in various gutters around the city.  I’ve actually been working hard on the Starflight remake!

This is what I am doing – I am creating a planet generator for the game.  This planet generator takes in the planet map from the original game and upscales it, adds mountains, hills, and so on.  Currently being created are the albedo (color), normal (bump), height (parallax), and roughness (shininess) maps.  I also created a test environment in the game where I can play around with some planet generator controls to fine tune stuff.

And yes… here is a video.  Break out the popcorn!

That’s right!  We can now orbit around any planet in the game.  And not only that, we can also use the sensors to scan the planet and have the science officer analyze the sensor results (but the game does not take his skill level into account yet).

A few other improvements have been done also.  Ship acceleration math has been fine-tuned and now follows very closely to the original game for class 1 to 5 engines with any amount of ship mass.  Check out the graph below – the blue line shows the acceleration points for the original game, and the red line shows the curve generated by the formula I developed.

The winning formula:

acceleration = ( ( 500 – mass ) / 500 ) ^ 3.5 ) * 1.75 * maxAcceleration + engineClass

The resulting acceleration is in G units and is rounded to the nearest integer.  Note that the top speed for all engine classes is the same – it’s only the acceleration (how quickly you can dodge missiles and escape encounters) that changes.  This acceleration code is now in the remake and is working.

I have also updated the area beside the main viewport in space flight mode.  It is currently a circuit board texture, and I think it’s just a placeholder until (maybe never?) I find something better.

The ship in space flight mode now shows the correct number of cargo pods that you have purchased, along with showing the laser and missile turrets only if you have purchased them.  The status display does the same now.

The video below shows the orbit, sensors, analysis, and de-orbit working in the remake.  What do you think?

As the heading says – players can now return to the docking bay!  And from there, return to spaceport by disembarking.  Development is moving along nicely…