Well here I am, back in the UK. I love it in Shang Hai, but I’m also glad to be back. The downside of being in China is that there is no access to Facebook or twitter, but the upside of this is that there is no access to Facebook or twitter.
I was continuing to code while away, but the blog has fallen two weeks behind what I’m actually working on. We’ll start an effort to do a little catch up now.
As you should all know by now, the first weapon we created was the not so humble plasma torpedo as seen at the start of this blog. It has undergone a few changes but remains functionally the same despite all the work on the code that supports it. This is because the code that supports the plasma torpedo became more abstract projectile code.
I don’t mean an abstract class. The weapons themselves are derived classes based on a WeaponGeneric class, but the projectiles are just one class with lots of options, and I do mean lots. These options are often eliminated on instantiation simply to make the code more performant, although I suspect many of the projectiles might remain a tiny bit memory chubby as they hold a number of pointless references. It’s unlikely to be significant though, and the options are left there to play with so that you can create interesting projectiles. The next most basic being the spinning Photon torpedo. It’s kinda like a space shotgun.
After that things start to go off the rails pretty quickly. We had Magnetic mines as you saw last week (If you actually found the blog as I couldn’t tell anyone about it).
Then there was the singularity mine which is currently almost as deadly to the ship that drops t as anyone else.
Then came the early, less sophisticated tracking missiles.
The pretty but can’t hit the broad side of a barn, Wonky missiles
And just yesterday, whatever this nonsense is…
Of course, this isn’t some final weapon list for the game, and not even anywhere near an exhaustive list of the daft creations we’ve made so far. Nor is it any kind of sensible indication of what visuals can me expected since most effects are placeholder. It is however, a decent demonstration of what the projectile and weapon code can be configured to do. If you have daft ideas we’d love to hear, and possibly make them. You can contact use the usual way over social media: Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.
Next week I’ll go over the other type of projectile code I was working on. BEAM WEAPONS!
bye for now.