I actually sat down and did a lot of stuff I didn't feel like programming today,and now I'm glad I did because some good stuff came out of it.
Good Thing #1: Carriers can launch fighters and bombers
The Carriers are my favorite ship type in the game so far (You can see some of them here. They lack the firepower to go toe-to-toe with another capital ship, but they are able to carry multiple wings of space fighters and bombers, which do their dirty work for them. When you have a Carrier selected, you can click on a button that allows you to launch a wing of either fighters or bombers (I haven't put the button into the texture yet, so for now its mapped to the right arrow key[grin]). The wing you just launched becomes an autonomous unit with all the abilities of other ships. When the fighters become damaged, or are in danger of being destroyed by a superior force, you can return them to the relative safety of the Carrier, where they are repaired, and protected from direct attack(although if the carrier dies, you lose your ships). Anyways, today I wrote the code that allows them to "spawn" new ships adjacent to them, and I also added a little thing to the designator labels that displays the current number of air wings aboard a Carrier if you select it, but the labels are "smart", so they wont display Fighter Wings 0/0 on a Destroyer with no fighters. Anyways, here's a screen of a carrier about to launch a wing of its fighters. Note the new designator features.
Good Thing #2: Animation!
The other cool thing I wrote today was an animation system, that I'm going to use for the simple battle animations(ie. explosions, missile trails, etc). You pretty much can define a new animation in the game by editing a notepad file, which allows Mark to mess with them if he wants to. The only animation we have so far is an explosion animation I stole from our earlier game, Angels 20. It looks ok, but we are going to need a more "spacy" one for later. It doesn't look quite as good sitting still as it does in motion obviosly, but here's a screeny of a Battleship attacking a Fleet Carrier.
Good Thing #3: Recharging Shields
This wasn't a very big thing, but I'm going to throw it in here anyway. This system pretty much means that when it becomes your turn after being the enemies turn, all your ship's shields recharge by a certain percentage determined by a parameter when you create a new Ship type. Pretty straight forward, but the complicated part comes when you use unused Action Points to "over-charge" you shields above their maximum limit. This takes a lot of energy, and the effects only last for one turn, but it allows a ship in dire straights to "hunker down" for that one turn it takes for help to arrive... or something like that.
Unfortunately, some bad stuff happened today too.
Bad Thing #1: Not Testing Often Enough
One of the things on my list to do for today was a minimap, so I sat down and got to coding, but for some reason, after 30 minutes, I hadn't tried to compile the code I had written. I don't know why I didn't, but i just blindly went forward for about an hour, and when I actually did compile it, there were so many vague errors, that in the end I just ended up pulling all the new source code out of the game. Oh well, a lesson well learned, I'll probably have the new version done sometime soon, and I'll give you guys a screeny.
Mark has been drawing up his regular stuff, here's an outline of his latest ship, a Battle Cruiser for the Archangelesk Dominion.
Well thats all for now, Talk to you guys later!
