Here's a capture from the game with the new shield effect and the ship explosion up and running. Not too bad! There is a ton of ground work in here too. I have my whole system to ship stats, displays (on the target ship the green centered bar is the shields, on your ship you can see your laser power, shields and nanites). The particle engine is up and running. Along with a bunch of underlying scripting systems (which are really visible in the demo).

Next up is asteroid fields. I've been thinking about it today and have a good idea of how to get them rendering. They are basically going to be another particle system, but we only want to render the visible ones. In theory we could render all of them with one render call, but then regnerating them would be tricky. So I'm going to build the particles in a three by three grid around the player, so we'll draw all of the asteroid with 9 render calls and we will only need to rebuild the render when the player moves beyond the grid cell. Should be a good blend of build cost and render cost.