the Solar System you would probably see something like the following image.
This would be a part of the introductory cutscene that I hope to show you in the near future. These screens would be interleaved with "cinematic" title screens explaining the back story. In order to draw the purple path you see in the picture, I needed to implement a BSpline plotting algorithm. It's not yet perfect as I would ideally be able to implement constant arc length parametrization (!). You can't see it from the picture, but the path is being rendered as a 3D polyline joining various rectangle polygons. The issue is that the curve segments are not spaced equidistantly. Then again, if you can't see it then it's not really a problem. It's not high priority right now but I would like to have more control over it.
The second part of the title gets us to the fundamental typewriter effect we so desperatly need in an universe like this. I have implemented this effect using my UI library:
The speed of the Typewriter can be configured using its CharactersPerSecond property. Using this information we can determine how many characters to reveal at each update. The Typewriter is using a Direct2D TextLayout object. Since this object needs to be instantiated with its text content from the beginning, i.e. the text string is an argument of the constructor, I assumed that recreating it at each character update would not be the best approach performance-wise. What I hope is a better solution was to create this object fully invisible (i.e., transparent). The TextLayout allows us to apply brushes (i.e. colours) to specific text ranges. So that's what the animation is doing. At each update it increases the number of character the green brush is applied, while the others stay transparent. Each update generates a TextRangeChanged event, which in turn is used to update the caret's position. The next step will be to implement a blinking animation for the caret and other nice features such as carriage return, line scrolling and so on.
This is a feature that will be used extensively in the actual game. The log window, or more enthusiastically, THE COMM CHANNEL, will display information about what's going on in the minds of the AI-controlled ships. So, THE COMM CHANNEL, will describe "in prose" what's happening on screen. I enjoy both seeing space dogfights but also reading about them. Hopefully, reading sentences like "Red 5, breaking formation", "ALL HANDS, BATTLESTATIONS!", "IT'S A TRAP", or "I'll see you on the other side" will add to the idea of witnessing a space battle from the command room of a capital ship. Ideally the radio chatter would also be fully voiced, but that maybe is stretching too far the imagination considering the resources currently available.
That's it for now, back to implementing the blinking caret
