Plan for David "FenrirWolf" Grace

Another day, another item marked off my checklist!

The particle system is in place. I stripped out all of the 2d stuff and made it a fully 3d system. It can handle regular billboarded particles (I call these "dots"), or animated 3d meshes. It's got its own render loop though currently it's not optimized. Once I get all of it working I will sort particles by texture to minimize state changes.

Here's are some explosions using just plain ole dot particles.

[image]http://gapingwolf.com/crusade/ss/ss/thumb/e26bd24d32d0719dfe7a0af53cb3ebc...

[image]http://gapingwolf.com/crusade/ss/ss/thumb/0367979aa0c83b1e608151baf4dbf67...

[image]http://gapingwolf.com/crusade/ss/ss/thumb/187aece16f87dae32fe8cffff59c516...

I've also tested out the mesh rendering part of the particle system. This will be used for effects like smoke, debris, shockwaves, etc. In fact, some of the rings can be seen here.

[image]http://gapingwolf.com/crusade/ss/ss/thumb/d2b345e1b261e2fb47a952d32519f97...

[image]http://gapingwolf.com/crusade/ss/ss/thumb/45cd5a99cda20861a0b9649700d331e...

[image]http://gapingwolf.com/crusade/ss/ss/thumb/7f38a5d6831b2b7505e2f426108df9b...

(You'll have to excuse the untextured player's ship.)

So, that means the particle system is nearly done. Once that is out of the way, the only thing remaining to do will be the foreground renderer -- for things like cities, space stations, etc. that the player can interact with.

After that, I want to clean up the level structure and start work on an external level editor. I might also do an object editor, as all objects in the game can have snippets of script attached to them. (This goes for events in the level, so ideally the level editor will let me test this out, too.) This will likely mean modularizing the engine itself a little bit more. It's MOSTLY modular, but the rendering code exists partially inside of the primary game loop.

I'm making progress! Not sure if I will reach my late January demo target, but I can try!