Hey everyone!
Welcome to the first normal update of the year! I’m very excited for what the year will bring to Pacific Fury, and I’m happy to have you all along for the ride! With that being said, this month was both slow, and eventful, so let’s get into it!
Things we have done:
I have some cool things this month that got done! The stuff I’m reporting on here will be things that were worked on through December and January to make up for the non-traditional December update.
Firstly, there has been progress with the cannon particle effects! I’ll get a video out later this month once it’s been applied, but in short, the old effects didn’t look super great, and I wanted to see what the particle engine can do so I spent some time doing a version 2 on those. It’s still not completely done, but it’s starting to near the final stage.
The second thing done this month is actually several things in one. I have been working on getting damage to impact the sinking of ships, which means buoyancy. The problem here is that PhysX doesn’t support buoyancy natively, so I’ve been implementing it manually. Throughout the process of getting this to work I’ve gotten not only sinking to work on a physics level, but it is directly impacted by the flooding done to a compartment. It’s not a true simulation, but as water enters a ship, it’ll force that part of the ship to sit lower in the water, until there is too much water in the ship and the entire thing will sink. This is tied to our damage compartment system, and each compartment is handled separately to create very nice sinking effects (since it’s a non-scripted physics event). As a part of this, I had to update our hit location exporter to take into account some new parameters, and I added a new feature to the engine to draw the hit locations for us. This second part will eventually make it’s way to the UI so that users can see 1: exactly the hit bounds of the ships, but more importantly 2: they can see the health of each compartment by just looking at its color! I will be posting images of this to the discord within the next few days, as well as screens/video of the new particle effects!
Things we are going to work on:
The plan for this next month is to update the Fubuki and Mogami to be compatible with the new flooding system (need to re-export their hit locations files from the new exporter).
After that we will finally assemble and test the Mogami, and apply the new cannon effects to every ship’s guns.
I’ve got a few engine tasks to get done as well. I need to make our 2d icons hide when their parent entity is not selected. I’d also like to start working on weapon targeting and creating a new command to allow ships to directly target other entities instead of an “area attack”.
I also need to further test our sinking physics to make sure everything is on the up and up, especially for the larger ships like the Mogami.
Things we are having trouble with:
Nothing to report on in terms of development, but in the interest of full disclosure, I want to let you all know that I’m currently doing the job hunt thing since I’ve finished college, and while I’m unemployed (hopefully won’t be for much longer) I’m putting our artists on hold so as to be careful with my personal finances. As soon as I start working, we will be progressing the art side of things with full force, but until then I’m going to save a few dollars and work on the engine which only costs time.
Thank you all for your continued support and I’m excited to see what the future will hold for the community and Pacific Fury!
Let the Storm Begin!
God Bless,
WWJD