Still not much different to show. Got much more work on the editor and camera done. I now have a cinematic camera and a nice system to transition into the cinematic camera and the game play camera. I can actually see myself creating levels with the editor now.

Built a human size object in the game so I now have some scale (a man in a space suit). It's also part of the initial cinematic in the tutorial level. It helped me identify the fact that I need to get the coloration in the replica (model) editor soon.

I was planning on working on the particle systems, but I decided that I wanted to be able to select an object in the world and fire at it as my next visible goal. So that involves writing a spatial representation so that I can have a picker. So over the past few days I've been writing a quad-tree for representing space. This has also given me a max level size, which is 25k by 25k. I think this will be a pretty good size. At 60 meters / second (the current max speed of the Chicago) it will take a little under 7 minutes to cross. Hopefully that will be large enough.

I'm just finishing up the quad-tree spatial query now, which will allow me to select items with the targetting recticle. After that, I'll work on firing a beam from the Chicago's cannons to the selected object, which will require some kind of tagged location on the replica.

Got a lot of editor work done. I can now add new actions from a grouped list and I should have the multi-line text editor done tomorrow. I also figured out the mechanism in the editor I want to use for adding attachment points and particle emitters. So I will probably do that soon. The game is going to look a lot better once the engines actually start firing. I'm also using a variant of the particle system for drawing asteroid fields which will greatly help define the terrain of a map. I still need to work on the issue of scale. I don't have a great idea of how large a typical map should be yet. I need to fill up the tutorial map with content so that it feels like a real level and play with it. To get that accomplished I need to have a better asteroid object in the game along with the asteroid field object.

Since I'm not going to get this all done in 5 days I guess I should admit that I'm not going to submit to the build-dream-play contest. But that's okay, I'm making really good progress and I think I'm still on track for my secondary goal, which is to have a shippable game around February. I think I'm going to pick an arbitrary date of Feb 22 and keep that as a target.

Nothing worth a screen shot today. Put in the whole infra-structure for saving and loading scripts. Also connected the actual type editors. So now if you are editting a location in a field, you can just use the joystick to move to a location. I was afraid that the reflection systems wouldn't work on the xbox (you can't create an object from the classes name on the xbox, like you can on the pc). But fortunately that is not true, so it made my job about a 100 time easier. I need to make a multi-line text editor, which I'm really dreading, but I should do that soon.

After a little more editor work, I will probably implement a follow camera script command, a spawn asteroid field script command, and then write my particle engine (for drawing asteroid fields).

I after that's done, probably the next thing will be to get the laser cannon up and running on the ship. I need some notion of the named point on the model, so I can specify where the beam comes from. I also need to create my first animation function which will aim the two laser cannons at the target.

Some more work on the editor. Still a ways to go before I can get to the state where I'm just adding custom editor code for new actions. I need to allow the editor to pretend to be the game so that it can process the same script actions as the game can. Luckily I'm doing it early enough that I think it can be done fairly painlessly.



Here's a picture of the editor so far. Notice the grenn cursor and the edit text where you set the location of the player ship for start up.

Now that the replica editor is in better shape I can build a more final version of the Chicago (the player's ship). I still need to adjust the texture scale (it just looks like noise right now). I've actually spent far too much time figuring out the right dimensions for the ship to be realistic. The Chicago has a crew of about 150people and is around 150m in length.



I've also done some of the initial work on the mission editor. Still tons to do, but I have a fairly simple way of adding fields to the editor for each kind of scripting action. I'd love to be able to use this interface to be able to debug a mission, and luckily the "game" is still fairly simple at this point, so I think if I encapsulate playing the game enough I should be able to pull it off. But I still have a ton of groundwork: Saving and loading missions, editting the fields, allowing different controls for editting. I started doing the editor more because I wanted to test out implementing a cinematic camera for the start of the mission. My goal is to be able to select (or create) a placement action, move down to the location field and then use the joystick to move the object around the level. Some thing with defining a set of camera of motion splines.

I was really hoping to get down by the 23rd so I could submit, and I might still do it, just to see what, if any feedback I get, but the game is still very far from ready. But I am really happy with the progress I've made so far, considering I'm only working a few hours at night 4 or 5 days a week.