More and more stuff put into the background now!
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Cities, textures, umm... other stuff as well. Any drone which is wrapped in lazy{} will
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be loaded in the bg.
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Right now I'm working to get geomaps (i.e., terrain) to load in bg. It's mostly done. Thread bugs (for instance, if I do GL calls from within a thread) are showing up nicely so far. I have a few more issues to address, for instance there is a crash bug that I will fix today where if you visit a city and leave it before it finishes loading, it will crash. Oops =) Just requires a bit of data reorganization, nothing major.
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What after this? I feel I should maybe release another demo. Honestly, I think at this point I'd probably get some good tips, and it would help clarify what really needs to still be added gameplay-wise. I have a lot of ideas for what remains to make the gameplay more coherent, but they are just sort of floating around right now.
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I should wrap a few more things in lazy {} to help speed up the loading process for systems. I need to rework some things with the control scheme and entering a planet (right now, the control variables aren't transformed to the new coordinate frame so when you enter a planet it gets all confused about your heading and your ship whips around depending on the planet's rotation). I definitely need to fix the autopilot drones, and also fix the cruisers so they fly more reasonably (it all relates to acceleration getting munged).
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I also kind of feel at this point like maybe now is the time for some more particle effects or whatnot. Well maybe not quite yet, but soon.
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Whew, I guess the point is right now I'm just fixing smaller things and working on load times.
2004-11-17