Hey everyone!
I managed to take control over the updates again this month! First off, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I hope that everyone has had a fantastic holiday season and is ready for the new year! This is the first post of 2021 and I hope and plan to have a great year in both my personal life and in PF development! I thank all of you for being a part of the community and for supporting this project! let’s get started on the update!
Things We Got Done:
Alright, Let’s start the list as there are a large number of small pieces that we got working this month!
First, turrets now fire physics-based projectiles. Of course, we use PhysX for our physics engine, so this means we create an engine entity that uses PhysX to calculate the travel of the shell. We’ve further built on this by implementing collision detection which detects contact between shells and objects (the shell vs ship collision has yet to be tested as of me writing this post. Though it runs on the same tested shell vs ocean collision so only minor tweaks will be needed). We also have particle effects for water explosions, as well as ships exploding and shells hitting ships. This is the payoff for updating the particle system earlier in the year! You’ll be able to see a few screens of water explosions below in engine.
We have extended the action system so now the internal engine interface between systems and the game manager. This will allow quick development later and is the core of how entities react to each other!
On the art side of things, we have progressed with our buildings. These buildings are in preparation for Milestone Three which will include the land bases! Getting these models worked on now will save us time later down the road, and it keeps people busy while I have been wrapping up the Milestone One engine code.
I also want to report that several bugs that were present earlier in the year have been fully resolved thanks to a quick change to the rendering system, and the conversion to PhysX movement based physics!
Things we are having issues with:
We still are wrapping up Milestone One. We have a couple more engine things and one or two small art related details to get done before we have our test scenario out. I really did expect this to be done this last month, but with the holiday season and a few bugs to work on, it really just didn’t pan out. Thankfully we still got a lot done (as listed above) so we should be very close to getting this test out and wrapping Milestone One up for good.
Things we are going to do:
This month I have to test the shell vs ship collisions, test the damage calculations, and I may try to implement a damage readout. We also need to make an adjustment to the hit boxes, to make sure they are scaled properly. After that we will build the test scenario and launch it. Art wise we should get some in-engine renders of the buildings, and possibly some progress on the next ship!
Overall, I’m super pumped about the progress we’ve made over the last year. Many engine systems were developed, two ships were fleshed out, our team has grown to include a new artist and we are almost done Milestone One. I’m really excited to keep working and as always let me know if you have any questions!
As always,
Let the Storm Begin,
Happy New Year and God Bless,
WWJD
