- Tightened up them controls. Friction and inertia are tweaked to feel more like flying a starship than a yaw/pitch/roll demo.
- Lights, Action, Camera. This stupid pun has been driven into the ground for years by pencil-necked game developers like myself. I perpetuate the pun by showing that you too can control the camera with the second analogue stick on an Xbox360 pad.
- Control System Refinement. The game controller class can now detect when you're holding a button as opposed to having just pressed it for the first time. This is pretty important for things like, oh, I don't know, menu systems. Can't believe I didn't have it in there from day one.
- Debug Options. I added a bunch of profiling and debugging toggles to the console, so you can start a log dump of the game's performance over time and expose certain variables as "health bars" onscreen.
Tomorrow, on Novarunner: Who knows? I'm hoping to get back in the game code and start rigging up the way to dump and load a new star system for the jump. Once that's loading properly, I'll add the code to handle the "jump" cinema scene and make the transition pretty.
I should probably also get docking with ships working. So much to do!
Perhaps one day I will call Microsoft and thank them for the gift to inspiration that is the Xbox360 game controller. Nothing quite inspires me to work on my game like seeing a lonely, ignored piece of hardware sitting forlornly on my desk, waiting to be wired up to a fifty tonne interstellar death machine.
Finally, as Rob Loach knows, I've been interested in getting Tao working well under OS X. Step one is figuring out how to redistribute Mono so my end users don't have to install it. I've started researching how to construct a minimal Mono.framework for Tao apps.
