Since last week, i've released the new combat prototype version, and i've been so busy making patch after patch that i didn't even find time to update the dev journals. Sorry :(

The best is, i've lost the original image (the one that i blurred in the previous update). It might be somewhere.. but i have a few hundred screenshots now, so i'll post one that is "similar":





This is a "fleet" screenshot, demonstrating a static battle between 200 ships. I'm saying "static" because there's no way i can get 200 players at the same time, so i've setup the ships statically; some of them are exploding, others are firing.. but they're not moving.

The combat prototype is now at version 0.4.e. Each patch is getting better and better. There are still some issues that i need to investigate. The two main problems are related to stability (i've recently fixed a crash bug in the server, it's now pretty stable; but there are still crashes in the client, it's related to getting NaN values in the physics, i need to investigate) and to performance (the client seems heavily CPU dependent, and there seems to be a leak, meaning that performance goes down after a few rounds). There is a third problem, which is not as urgent, but that needs to be solved one day, and that is the network interpolation algorithm. It makes ships "zigzag" when the latency fluctuates, ie. that happens often.

A contest has been started on the forums, to produce a teaser for the combat prototype. It'll get posted on many news sites, as well as gamedev.net as an image of the day (sorry Ravuya, didn't have time to submit anything sooner :)). So, in the past days, i've spent most of my time cleaning disk space, recording and compressing videos and uploading them. Hopefully this teaser will be ready early next week.