Working on lightning strikes. I decided rather than get burned out working on the gameplay and so forth that I'd be better to work on lightning. Since of all the weather effects, I know that I most need that. Anyhow, I basically have it worked out so not much need to journal.
@p
Maybe after that, if I still feel up to it I will work on tornadoes. A lot else is also possible, for instance fire pillars. I have thought that with the tornadoes and so forth, what might make the most sense is to just completely use autogen. It's quite easy and heck, I can so I may as well. But all those sort of vortices or whatnot are very easy to make as meshes using the existing autogen, no need to go into blender and this way they can look quite different on different planets...
@p
Beyond that, I'm thinking that the weapons need to fire faster. I will adjust the rate. They also need (much) higher drain. Since I balanced the DPS and whatnot using gnuplot, that should be pretty good. I'd like to fix a bug with the firescale animator, i'm not sure what's causing it but it's screwed up for enemy ships. Also, the landing patterns are a bit broken, I need to fix that. I have a feeling there may be a broken/missing replicate() somewher, which may even be responsible for both.
@p
I am thinking, one change that might add a whole lot is to work some more on the name generators. It would make a lot of sense if: 1- names from different cultures really sounded alike, and 2- maybe the syllables used in the language generator for when you don't speak the language should match. And other things within that culture. To this end, I should have some kind of syllabus (ha) listing all the syllables in a language, and their form/function. I'm not sure 100% how it would work, but I think it should be doable without too much trouble. Tricky, but doable.
@p
Anyhow, then I should tidy up the covert stuff, it seems to work fairly well right now. I need to tie some criminal charges to it. Finally, I still need to finish up the employment system and outlaw system. How to be declared an outlaw? Hmm... Well certainly a lot to think about!
2005-02-08