A lot of stuff has gone in since the last time I posted a progress report, but the stuff I work on usually isn't visible in a screenshot, or Joe posts a blog first with screenshots that show off what I've been doing as well as his. Today I have a screenshot that you will only see on this site, at least until I check in my code.

I got pathfinding into the engine yesterday, and before that I worked on the interface and generating a random map. Today I wasn't really sure what I wanted to start working on, because I needed to consult with Joe to see what he was working on, and Joe was out this morning for a doctor's appointment. I started working on getting a selection cursor in the game, figuring that I could start there and add some limited functionality into the interface. When Joe came in, we started discussing scripting ship battles, so I was going to work on that, and he was going to work on the minimap, but neither of us got to work on that because Alex came in and started talking about the star map background.

Brad and Larry came in and got involved in the discussion and we decided that we needed parallax, with a back layer of stars, and then a clear layer with just the grid, on top of which would be the game objects like planets and ships.

So when I finally got back to the computer, I set aside my work on the selection cursor to start work on the new background. I made the tilemap clear, so that the game layer was just the grid and game objects, and made a static background. I was just about ready to start trying to use texture transformations to create the parallax effect when Alex came in again and saw my screen. So I showed him how it looked as I moved the camera around, and he decided that the nebulas weren't quite right. So he gave me some textures with just nebulas, and I used those to create another layer.

Alex left before I got it working, but I managed to create a tilemap layer for the nebulas that is above the game objects, so the ships can move under them. It moves at the same rate as the game layer, so the nebulas will always be in the same spot. It's pretty cool, but judge for yourself:




I rather like how the edge of the nebula is over the star. It's a 2D image, but it seems 3D because of how it interacts with the sun's mesh.

As a side note, DXTex is pretty cool. It's really easy to make semi-transparent textures with it.

Well, I'm getting pretty hungry and tired, so I'm going to wrap this up.