Gearing up for communications with the Mechan 9 robots, I searched around and found a halfway decent robot head on the ‘net.  I brought it into Blender, exported it into the Collada file format, and then imported it into Max.  All of the textures and materials were lost, of course.  It’s 2018 – you would’ve thunk that people would have found a way to share materials and textures seamlessly between 3D modeling programs by now.  Maybe by 2118.  Anyway…

This is the Mechan 9 as seen in the original game:

And this is the Mechan 9 I have for the remake so far… now, don’t freak out about the colors… those are just to help me identify the different parts of the head.  These colors are not the actual colors you will see in the game.

For the past week or so I’ve been working bit by bit to get encounters in.  The Starflight remake is made up of several “locations” in the space flight scene that the player can enter and leave.  They are currently “docking bay”, “just launched”, “star system”, “in orbit”, “hyperspace”, and now the new one “encounter”.  Last night I was able to get the remake to the point where the player can enter and leave encounters at will, from either a star system or hyperspace.

My first stab at the encounter location was simply to have the player and ships in the scene.  But I noticed a problem when I added the automatic camera dolly system.  The auto-dolly system moves the camera back and forth to make make sure that all of the alien ships are visible in the screen.  With this system running, the player no longer has any plane of reference to get a feel for where they are in the scene.  To make things worse, the dust particle system had the particles going in and out of the camera (instead of parallel to the camera) because of the auto-dolly… and the rotating skybox did not help things.  Put it all together, the movement of things in the encounter location did not make sense and quickly made the player queasy.

So, I decided to add a grid in the view to help ground the player.  I think it works.  The grid also shows a boundary ring that the player can cross to exit the location.  In the original game, this boundary shifted depending on how far away you were from the alien ships and debris.  I’m not sure if I like that.

Currently, the only alien ships that have a ship model to display are the Mechans.  All other alien ship will appear as a placeholder pill thingy.  I think the next step is communications with the alien beings!  Here is a video of the work done so far with encounters.

Just in time for Halloween, I have implemented something that gives the game an ominous feeling… that something is coming… for you!  Muahahahaha!

In other words, I have implemented radar.

Now now, I know the original game did not have “radar”… or, did it?  The original game would tell you “Movement detected” and give you X and Y coordinates that are relative to your ship.  So the original game DID have radar… albeit it was a text-based one!

In the spirit (yes, another Halloween pun) of the resto-modding of the original game, the radar I have implemented is a graphics-based one, but it works exactly as the original did.  Once in a while the radar will detect something and let you know it’s position relative to you, and the distance to the encounter is indicated by the loudness of the beep, and also by how intense the green detection dot appears.

This is all very much a work in progress, so there are still some things to do to improve this radar.  For example, I want to make it so that if nothing is detected for a bit of time, the radar fades out.

Here is a video showing the radar in its current state.  Watch this at midnight tonight with all the lights off, and pretend that monsters are coming for you…