26 October, 2015
As always, it's been rather hectic the past week or so with preparations for Update 4. Art, again, took a fair chunk of time from the development cycle; so much so in fact that I almost thought I wouldn't get everything done. But, I'm glad to say everything I wanted to finish, I did... kind of.
My goal for this update was to do both the interior AND exterior art for the new Flying Fox. As I was working on exterior art though, I realized that if I rushed it to be able to move on to the interior, BOTH elements would suffer visually. Since this art probably won't get another pass until later in the Alpha stage, I decided it was best to hold the interior, and work the exterior up to 70% of completion. Doing this, I'm much more confident the art will stand up for WIP screenshots and videos. Plus, we'll be looking at this for a few good months--I didn't want it to become hard on the eyes. Obviously then, I'll be beginning work on the interior art for the next couple of updates. More on that in a minute...
Another goal for this update was to improve AI direct aiming. I DID have time to work on this, and have made an improvement. Once the AI is lined up, I think you'll find it now scores more hits, more often, from a greater distance. What's throwing the solution off a bit now is the slowness at which the AI aims the ship. It's easy to defeat right now because they simply don't rotate with their full potential to precision. I was hoping to be able to work on this aspect, too; but that time escaped me in favor of the art task. So, I'll be working to improve this next.
Beyond that, I did find time to work on a fair amount of smaller items, one of which actually turned into a BIG item. If you recall from Update 3, the Flying Fox was disappearing from the orbit it was in around a distant moon. I THOUGHT this was a simple mission code bug concerning object placement. Turns out that this was only PART of a bigger problem. The placement was in fact bugged. For example, if you expect an object to be in orbit with a periapsis of 400 km and an apoapsis of 500 km, but the mission code places the object at a periapsis of 900 km, obviously the orbital velocity is all screwed up and the orbit degrades quickly. Once I had this fixed I still found I had a problem though.
One issue was Leadwerks was not returning 64-bit object position data. The truncated 32-bit data was causing errors in orbital calculations, and that was degrading orbits. Switching to 64-bit position data (as was originally intended) fixed this problem instantly. However, there STILL was another problem--entering SAN/SLEEP was causing celestial bodies to "jump" slightly out of position, which also adversely affected orbital calculations. Finally, when an alarm triggered the player to wake from SLEEP, the SLEEP event was not cleaning up correctly, and this was also causing celestial bodies to jump out of position by many kilometers.
Once all of these items were fixed, the orbital simulation was once again stable. So much in fact that my new test "sandbox" mission finally worked properly. The sandbox mission puts at least one object around each planet and moon in the system. You start docked, cold and dark. Your two critical goals are to undock, and eventually dock again. What you do inbetween is up to you....
Beyond this, Michael and I were able to add a few new audio items, one of which was added to demo some new signal functionality. It is intended that the SAI will generate feedback audio for things the pilot normally wouldn't hear (weapon hits, for example). While there are no volume controls for this yet, we did get in SAI feedback for FLUX-generated thrust, weapon firing, reloading, and hits on an object. More importantly though is the new training platform music channels.
It's been a feature goal that signals not only travel through space, but also can be blocked by celestial bodies, AND signal data can degrade over range. You may have noticed before that you could lock on to a localizer signal for a ship that was orbiting a completely different body. This is no longer the case. Signal data will degrade over range, and if a celestial body comes between you and the sender, the signal will be blocked. To demo this, Michael was kind enough to put together a few original songs in a FMOD playlist, and I assigned a music channel to each training platform. Music frequencies, for now, always end with .301 So, if you entered something like 45.2.301, and the signal actually reaches your ship, you'll hear music. As you get further away, you'll hear more and more background noise and static as the signal degrades. Eventually, the signal is completely "lost".
This audio demo is not wasted, as it directly applies to an ATIS-like feature. Any ship with an STC will broadcast information to update you on local conditions. Likewise, eventually voice communications will have proper audio, too; and this will also need to be affected by the same type of blockage and degradation.
So, let's look ahead to the next update. First, Thanksgiving is coming up and so that is going to truncate development time in November. What's more, we won't be spending Thanksgiving at home. Instead, I will be out of town for the holiday week with my wife; and we are going to pick our daughters up from college (in Colorado). We're all going to spend the week in Estes Park, CO, in the mountains. We normally try to do this every summer, but it just didn't work out this year. So, we decided to do this for Thanksgiving. We LOVE the mountains, and mountain hiking, so I'm REALLY looking forward to unplugging, getting some fresh air (and maybe even some snow), and clearing my head.
What this all means is that I'm looking at only a 3-week update cycle. That is nowhere NEAR enough time to get the FF interior art done, AND do the control art so the ship is actually flyable with a proper cockpit interface. It just won't happen. So, here's what I'm thinking: I'm going to do what I can on interior art during the day, and get some coding done in the evening. I will then release what I have stable on November 17th as "Update 4.5". After the holiday, because of Christmas, we'll be looking at a similar situation for December; so I'll work until about the 20th of December and then release that as "Update 5" proper. By Update 5, it's my intent to have the Flying Fox flyable.
Of course, I could just say there won't be any update in November, but I REALLY don't want to do that. I think I can get enough done to make an update worthwhile. So, like it or not, this is what I'm doing
Considering this then, for update 4.5, we're looking at:
Item 1 -- Flying Fox interior work, part 1
Simply, anything and everything that needs to be done to get the interior art completed to 70%, get the cockpit controls working, get VMS implementation finalized--anything I can get done by Nov 17th towards this goal....
Item 2 -- Control Binding enhancements, part 1
There's been a lot of suggestions for additional binding functionality and features. I'll prioritize these items tomorrow and then start knocking them out as I can.
Item 3 -- Ship Part detachment due to force and damage, part 1
An example of this is damaging a radiator by running it into a station during docking, including the possibility of having it become detached from the ship. This does not include more refined forms of damage such as bending or shattering. Right now we're looking strictly at "coarse" representations.
ISI and I do have a goal for getting Rogue System to Steam in six months, and I'm developing a roadmap of items that should be done to make this a successful attempt. Basically it's business as usual, but I'll need to shuffle some tasks around to facilitate some things I want to achieve for the 1st Steam eAccess version. I'll be talking more about this soon.
Otherwise, as always, thanks for all the kind words, suggestions, and constructive feedback. Also, thanks for the extra effort in trying to help spread the word about RogSys. I will tell you that there are noticeably positive results whenever you guys promote a video, or get a popular discussion going about RogSys. I truly appreciate the extra effort you all are putting forth in trying to make RogSys' early access a success!