by Vandar » 15 Apr 2015, 10:48
Well, the history of the project is long ... briefly said, it's been 3D data wise all the time, but there was only a map-like projection of space. No enemies, no fights. It's about exploration. Now I'm adding a new view for the data, showing space flight in 3D. Question is, if I want to use billboard sprites for planets, or make them 3D models, furthermore if I want to use procedural generation for the planets (which would be an interesting thing to do). And I'm afraid, once there are visible planets in space, players will want to land there.
Finishing the project ... um, probably will never happen. I started in 1995 or so when I was fascinated by Elite II - Frontier, worked on it for a while, had to dump a lot of code due to technology changes, started over with a new code base, dumped the new codebase, resurrected parts of the old code, translated it from C++ to Java and gave it a new Swing-based UI. At the moment it's not about completing something but a "I want to see if this works", which means embedding OpenGL in a Swing UI driven game. As a side effect I'm learning more about OpenGL, but more or less unintended.
Space monster brings questions: How metabolism works? What's engergy source? How they move?
In soviet russia, code debugs you.