Got the asteroid field up and running. I think it turned out really well. Several hundreds of asteroids at a cost of around 0.5ms. Plus the algorithm to store the asteroids in a 3x3 grid and only generate grids as you move around seems to be working really well. I accidentally had the force rebuild flag on during my first run and the render time was around 47ms! So by only building them when required I cut that down by 100x.

Not entirely sure what to work on next. The three main candidates are:

1) Add colorization to the replicas (models) so that I can improve their visual quality.
2) Add the nebulas which will also force me to add fogging to the game
3) Some work on the mission editor, trying to flesh out mission one some more.

I think I'm probably going to go with 3. I've spent a lot of time on the rendering with all of the particle work. Getting the first mission up will keep me from forgetting that portion of the code. Plus it opens up a lot of next items to work on.

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.

The stats system is in, so ships have actual hitpoints now. Plus I built the system in such a way that it can accept modifiers that allow the stats to be changed based on effects or things like improvement from leveling the player's ship. Next up is to get the shields to fail once the stat is zero and then do the ship explosion. Once I have a sample of the chicago blowing up a ship I'll post another movie.

I also finished up the trigger system, so we can now add triggers that cause script to fire.