Time for an update.. regulars who follow my progress on irc or on the website won't learn anything new, but for the others..

Evolutional from gd.net, thanks to him, has been kind enough to let me know that a small article has been published in PCZone about Infinity. Shawn will be happy to see his station published in a magazine.. :)

The main news is the development of a space combat prototype. Unlike my previous prototypes, this one will be public, which means that it'll be open to anybody who's got the time ( rendez-vous on irc, no date fixed yet ) and the system requirements to run it. As it's a prototype, do not expect anything really advanced: the goal is to test a few sub-systems ( networking, physics, collisions, combat gameplay, etc.. ) but it won't be running all the nice graphics & shaders that i've developped in the past ( most of the models won't even be textured ), and the.. gameplay.. will be pretty basic ( hopefully already fun ... ? ).

My goal is to make the combat gameplay similar to the old arcade games, like XWing. It'll be mission based, PvP ( two teams, two battleships separated by a mine field ) and the area will be quite small ( while Infinity will be completely open ended ). Still that'll be very helpful to test the first components and the networking code.

All the details can be found in that thread.

So, where am i at, right now ? The networking code is running with physics, the playfield is created with placeholders, i've setup the basic control as well as 3 views ( internal, close external, far external ), and controls ( with side thrusters ), the collisions, the lasers ( ala Star wars ), the hitpoints/damage systems for ships and mines, and finally the A.I. targetting for the mines ( ships will be player controlled so they won't need A.I. ).

I'm now starting to implement turrets and hardpoints. It looks like i've hit a design problem in my system which will force me to rewrite a whole bunch of code. Fortunately, this code is only a few days old, so it's not like i'll have to rewrite thousands of lines. The problem is to handle objects that are attached ( mounted ) to other objects in network.

In the coming week, i'm planning to do these ( in rough order ):

- turrets/hardpoints
- handling player disconnections
- destructions of entities ( explosions of mines and ships )
- victory/defeat conditions
- basic H.U.D.

And then, polishing everything, adding effects ( maybe a couple shaders, a few textures, a planet and the starfield in the background ? ), enhancing the gameplay features and.. testing, testing, a lot.