Not much for you guys today, but Mark did draw up a new ship that is the first of the ships whose main abilities aren't for offense.
The Shield Ship
The Shield Ship is the first 'support' ship that Mark has finished, and probably is going to be the simplest 'support' ship in the game to use. Pretty much a shield ship is a giant moving battery that can recharge your other ship's shields, or give them a quick "overcharge" that can bring a ship's shields up past their normal limit, allowing a ship to survive an attack that would otherwise have destroyed it. The shield ships have very weak offensive capabilities, so using one as a ship-of-the-line probably isn't a good idea, although it has some small guns for point defense against enemy fighters and missiles. In general, it's probably a good idea to have a shield ship within recharge range of most of your ships, in case you need to give a damaged ship a little boost.
On the programming side of things, I've been working on some small things we discovered while playtesting the game at school. One of the most annoying things we discovered during the testing was how long it took some ships to move to their destinations. While normally this didn't matter that much, the fact that you couldn't do anything else until that ship's action was done really slowed down the game, and made it pretty boring, so today I spent some time rewriting some stuff and allowing the player to move ships as soon as he gives another ship the order to move. Besides that little fix, I've been writing the networking code for performing special actions such as launching fighters, charging shields, etc. Pretty boring stuff actually[grin]
I had some spare time in my computer science class, so I wrote this 2D heightmap program in about an hour. I'd like to code up a simple networked multiplayer dogfight game using this kind of terrain, but I haven't got the time what with school and Axis Shift, so I guess that will jsut have to wait until I'm done with one of the other two (or I have some spare time[wink]). Anyways, here's a screen of the terrain I randomly generated in the program:
EDIT: Nevermind about the screen of the terrain, I can't get my stuff to our server, sorry....
Anyways, I'll talk to you guys later!
