I'm working some more on weapons in Novarunner. You can fire ammo, but you can't see it, and the game bails on a not-implemented assertion in the bowels of weapon management. Obviously because I'm missing a stub or two.

I'll get that working, and then we can start to get collision detection working and other fun stuff along those lines. And then I can finally make the weapons unsuck.

Then, I can do some fun stuff: space station GUIs, etc. Stuff for you to look at since I know you're so devoid of screenshots.

I also want to fix up the radar. In particular, I came up with a nice idea for the player to remain aware of their surroundings without having to look around the cockpit for nearby relevance; I'm going to try and get it to work without being distracting. User interfaces are hard!

Das Engine

In other news, I'm still working on engine design in my spare time. Hopefully I can avoid many of the informal slap-dash things I've been doing when trying to span together a new engine for each game, and formalize a few design practices as well as implement some coding standards (finally). My standards are pretty good, but occasionally it's hard to read my code due to inconsistent naming and behaviour patterns. I'm gonna try and fix that and make nice, tight code with obvious responsibility. Ideally, the engine will just be a tight layer on top of Propane Injector itself, which will make life easier.

Two nice things it'll finally add to my repertoire: rendering buckets (depth-sort, etc, like in jpetrie's code) and a nice scene graph.

Those of you who argue the "make a game, not an engine" (like myself) can take comfort in the fact that I have a pile of informal code which could be coerced into making a decent engine, and normalization is never, ever bad.

Expect me to be posting some pretty diagrams over the next few weeks that will show you just what I am doing in terms of theory, while still being pretty.

There is no other news. I am older. So are you. We are all going towards some inevitable apocalypse.