Two images to make up for my lack of posting. I've continued to work on and improve the replica editor (I have to use that term becaues Model is already taken by XNA). It is just about complete, all that's left is selecting the child face for adding replica parts to another replica. A few hours of work at most. I've spent some time improving the usability since I'm going to be in there adding a lot of content soon.

I've also firmed up the "script" system so that I can build levels and scripts. I've tried to keep it as simple as possible. Scripts are composed of list actions with a time stamp that are triggered by events. So you can easily say, when the player enters this region I want to spawn a ship and have a dialog box 5 seconds latter that says, "I'm coming to get you." I added the time stamping to actions because I figured if I didn't I've be making a ton of events taht just corrseponded to time delays. This way events can be just for this where you don't know when of if they will happen (hitting a trigger volume for example). Should keep the scripting simpler.

Here's one of first things that you see during the tutorial.

Almost done with the model editor. I've spent several days on it now and it's getting close to ready for production. I'll make a better ship then the Chicago that I have right now (although I'll probably keep the orignal model around for some other ship type). After that I'll need to make a few large asteroids and some settlement shapes for the tutorial (and my test) level. I also figured out an interface change which I think will make controlling the ship much better. I had a system that required using the dpad for system selection (ship, drone wings or nano-pod), but I've moved that functionality to the the buttons with a two or three button press system. I think this means that I'll be able to control the game with just the two joysticks and the four color buttons (I'm a big fan of simplified controls).

A = Chicago's main weapon
X/B = Drone command (followed by another color press A = attack / Defend / Y = Stop target)
Y = Fire nano-pod (Y = Offsensive programs / X = Enhance / Y = Detriments / B = defensive programs)

There is a point latter in the game where you become a squad captain and get to order ships to focus on specific targets but that will be something that is done fairly rarely, so I'll leave the dpad for that.

Added the star sphere and turned on texturing. Also added camera control based on the targetting reticle, although it's not very smooth. Need to work on that. I also got it up and running on the xbox to make sure everything runs on it okay.