So I tinkered a bit more with Novarunner; namely the ships are now drawn out of juicy VBOs instead of in immediate mode (hurr). Doesn't provide much of a framerate improvement with only a few ships on screen, but when you're drawing 10-20 ships the framerate is constant, which was a big worry of mine.

Now you're sitting there, probably with Cheeto-stained fingers in a dank silverfish-infested basement, licking rainwater off of the windowsill and glaring at the screen because I haven't told you anything about my gameplay progress. You're practically hissing at this point, I presume.

Well, there is some good news; I tightened up the ship AI so it's reasonably more intelligent, and made the homing missiles use prediction for attacking moving targets. They're still not perfect, but they'll hit a moving ship slightly more accurately for massive damage.

I still need to implement the "ship transfer" system -- that is, when a ship has its engine charged up, it "jumps out" and is swapped a few seconds later for a new AI-created ship from the spawn table. This is harder to coordinate than you'd think, and I need to think about whether or not to limit the number of ships that can be in the system at once.

In other news, this entire weekend was pretty unproductive, which you would've noticed if I was on your Steam friends list and you got to see me bounce between four or five different vidjagames. I'm hoping to finish the game by Christmas -- all of the remaining bugs are pretty minor and content generation should go OK.