Got the particle system up, as well as stats system. So ships now have actual hitpoints and weapon damage. I'm adding some hud info now to display the shield level of your target as well as the shield, cannon and nanites on the players ship. I'll have another movie up in a few days.

Got the shield effect in, and I'm currently putting in a particle engine to shot out particles at the point of contact. I'm also going to use the particle system to simulate fires on board the ship once it has taken sufficient damage, and do the explosion. I'm a few days off from having the particle system in although I've been distracted playing Dead Space. The polish on the game is amazing. Once the shield particle system is in, I'll make another video with the new shield.

So here's a brief video of the Chicago firing it's weapons. All the pieces have come together. Notice that once the object is targetted, the weapons aims at it. I had to build an animation system that could use the matrices generate up to the point at which it was calculating the cannon's matrix and use that to solve where to rotate the cannon so that it would be aiming at the target. I also added a notion of a render effect that can be added to an entity that allows it to do certain transient drawing actions at named connector points. So in the case of the chicago, I have a laser cannon replica with a name connector point "weapon" then the laser cannon is added to the hull of the chicago with an aim at target animation controller. The nice thing is that this should be general purpose, so if you add a aim at target controller to any part of a replica (model) it will automatically aim at the target. I have also had to put in a lot of the game mode input for this, so there are placeholders for the drone and nanite commands now. I also needed to get a lot of the entity (the simulation object) up to the level were targetting information could be sent. Next step is to add some kind of shield effect. I'm still trying to think of how to make one that A) looks cool, B) represents being hit from multiple points. I've scene some hexagon shields that looked pretty cool. I think I might try that. I'll need to see if I can refactor my sphere triangle stripping code. Alfer that I will probably add the representation of the actual damage to a ship, and then a little ui work to represent the laser power level and the beginnings of the drone and nanite command interface.

Finished and tested the quad-tree spatial partition. I also spent some time writing some debugging tools for the quad tree so I can make sure it's putting objects in the correct cell.

I also added a new part type for the replicas, a connector. This is used to create location where effects or connections will occur. I added a connector to the Chicago so I had a location to fire the beam. Now I'm just completing the last part: The addition to the replica entity that lets me add effects so I can add the laser effect when the weapon fire command goes off.

Hopefully I'll have the laser in another day or two.

I also shifted the game commands to a queue so that I can replay games and it's a good step toward making the game networkable (although I'm not planning on doing that until at least version 2).