Well, between this and my last entry I released the first beta (hooray) and got a great, wonderful list of suggestions, probably too many to implement but if I can at least get to the larger ones it should be a big help.
@p
Between now and the beta 2, I want to work on two main features. First, when you shoot down NPC ships, you should get not only experience but also some cargo. This should help fix the current problem of not really being able to earn money in the starting system.
@p
Second, I'd like some cargo to be scattered around randomly. These pickups should be one time only (they never respawn), and they won't show up on your scanner (much like gem pickups and the cargo pickups) so you have to actually see them. How is it going to work, though?
@p
The answer to start with should be that they work exactly the same as the cargo pickups, since I think that is just the most reasonable thing. So there is just a cargo box sitting there. In the future though, it would be great to have wreckage that you can land at and poke your way through. Working with umake is truly awesome because this kind of feature only takes a day or two (including all graphics) to implement.
@p
Well, anyhow, that shouldn't be too hard. To this end, I'm going to implement a bit better gfx for the gems and cargo crates. I might as well use a special modeller for them, rather than have them always be the same model. That way you can have abetter idea what you are going to pick up before you get it.
2005-02-22