For the past week or so I’ve been working bit by bit to get encounters in.\u00a0 The Starflight\u00a0remake is made up of several “locations” in the space flight scene that the player can enter and leave.\u00a0 They are currently “docking bay”, “just launched”, “star system”, “in orbit”, “hyperspace”, and now the new one “encounter”.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

My first stab at the encounter location was simply to have the player and ships in the scene.\u00a0 But I noticed a problem when I added the automatic camera dolly system.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With this system running, the player no longer has any plane of reference to get a feel for where they are in the scene.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Put it all together, the movement of things in the encounter location did not make sense and quickly made the player queasy.<\/p>\n

So, I decided to add a grid in the view to help ground the player.\u00a0 I think it works.\u00a0 The grid also shows a boundary ring that the player can cross to exit the location.\u00a0 In the original game, this boundary shifted depending on how far away you were from the alien ships and debris.\u00a0 I’m not sure if I like that.<\/p>\n

Currently, the only alien ships that have a ship model to display are the Mechans.\u00a0 All other alien ship will appear as a placeholder pill thingy.\u00a0 I think the next step is communications with the alien beings!\u00a0 Here is a video of the work done so far with encounters.<\/p>\n<\/div>