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[zoq]

Sorry! I have been meaning to do a no-update -update just to confirm that I'm still alive, but wasn't sure if that's a good idea or no.

Not much has been done, because I have had a few very busy weeks at work and no time or energy to code in evenings or weekends (now the high-stress period seems to be over-ish). However, a partial additional reason is that the next logical step (avatar movement in ships and their gravity fields) is a significant feature and therefore requires some thinking and architectural work. I have some aspects of it planned already and I hope to start writing code soon. Can't promise anything, unfortunately, because the bills need paying

[Garthy]

Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of interesting things at the most inconvenient times. I hope that you're able to get through things and can get back into a position where you can work with interesting projects like this one again. Good luck.

[zoq]

I am happy to tell you that during the last weekend I finally had time to write some code again. Therefore, FPS-style moving inside the ships is getting quite ready. Control sensitivity and feel still require some tuning, and there are some bugs when the ship are moving and rotating, but most of the work is (at least I hope so) done now. I will put up a video hopefully during this week.

In addition to the player character, this in-ship movement tech also applies to ships. So, what does this mean? It means that you can park your ship inside another ship. If you root it to the ground, it will stay there as a piece of furniture regardless of what maneuvers you make with the larger ship. Or, if you wish, you can fly in the local coordinate system of the larger ship like you would anywhere. I don't see a reason why you couldn't park a yet smaller ship inside the small ship and everything still working all right, but this multi-level stacking hasn't yet been tested.

[peous]

Good idea ! So you can fly/move in "local gravity" ? Seems fun !

[zoq]

Phew! Finally I managed to finish the first-person movement. So now, you can move etc inside starships as you would in a minecraft world, for example. Next I'm probably going to do some better interactions, such as activating the cockpit module, as well as make sure the first-person movement is not affected regardless of how the ship moves and rotates and so on.

For accelerating ships I'm a bit torn. On one hand, it might make the gameplay uncomfortable, since your character, if not strapped in, would slide whenever the ship accelerates or decelerates, but on the other hand it could be pretty cool if done right.

Also, again if done right, rotating ships should also generate "gravity" just by that mechanism, without any modifications to the engine. Since I'm having artificial sci-fi gravity in any case, I'm not sure if that would be useful, but again it would be kind of cool. Maybe for large stations artificial gravity would cost a lot of energy, so it's cheaper just to make it rotate.

[zoq]

Short update: I squished all bugs in the rotation code, so now it doesn't matter how the ship is moving and rotating, you will experience the interior as stationary as long as the gravity is on. You will still be able to interact with the outside world without problems, like shoot a passing fighter with your laser rifle from an open airlock.

[insolent]

Hey zoq, just wondering how the game is coming along!  I'm a big fan of the small but growing voxel space sim genre and have been following all the games in it closely.  Until today, I thought the genre consisted only of ScrumbleShip, Blockade Runner, Pytheas, and Starmade - but now I see you're working on one too!

So I'm just curious if that's still coming along, and if there's a website or someplace I can follow your progress.  It sounds like you've got a lot of cool features either working or planned.

[zoq]

Hey zoq, just wondering how the game is coming along!  I'm a big fan of the small but growing voxel space sim genre and have been following all the games in it closely.  Until today, I thought the genre consisted only of ScrumbleShip, Blockade Runner, Pytheas, and Starmade - but now I see you're working on one too!

So I'm just curious if that's still coming along, and if there's a website or someplace I can follow your progress.  It sounds like you've got a lot of cool features either working or planned.

Quite a coincidence with the timing! After a summer full of very intense real life stuff (i.e. not a day off to code) a few days ago I started again to think about resuming this project, since I still think it would be very fun to play. And now that I'm logging in for the first time in months, I see a very recent post here.

If I could choose, I would drop everything else and work on this, but alas my finances do not allow for that at the moment. I hope to resume doing this on weekends now that I hopefully again have time for it, but I've learnt not to make any promises I can't be sure of being able to keep.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic, though. I'm optimistic that I will be able to work on this in the future, and some kind of a tech demo or alpha version would not be impossibly far even in the current stage.

Unfortunately I don't have a twitter account, or website, or anything besides this thread. I understand the importance of them in this business, but it has just been a matter of time allocation so far. I do promise to make at least a twitter account when I shall resume working on this.

[insolent]

Hey zoq, just wondering how the game is coming along!  I'm a big fan of the small but growing voxel space sim genre and have been following all the games in it closely.  Until today, I thought the genre consisted only of ScrumbleShip, Blockade Runner, Pytheas, and Starmade - but now I see you're working on one too!

So I'm just curious if that's still coming along, and if there's a website or someplace I can follow your progress.  It sounds like you've got a lot of cool features either working or planned.

Quite a coincidence with the timing! After a summer full of very intense real life stuff (i.e. not a day off to code) a few days ago I started again to think about resuming this project, since I still think it would be very fun to play. And now that I'm logging in for the first time in months, I see a very recent post here.

If I could choose, I would drop everything else and work on this, but alas my finances do not allow for that at the moment. I hope to resume doing this on weekends now that I hopefully again have time for it, but I've learnt not to make any promises I can't be sure of being able to keep.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic, though. I'm optimistic that I will be able to work on this in the future, and some kind of a tech demo or alpha version would not be impossibly far even in the current stage.

Unfortunately I don't have a twitter account, or website, or anything besides this thread. I understand the importance of them in this business, but it has just been a matter of time allocation so far. I do promise to make at least a twitter account when I shall resume working on this.

Glad to hear you haven't given up on the project, because it sounds really cool.  As far as a communication/update platform goes, you might also consider IndieDB if you haven't already.  It's free and a pretty good community for indie game devs.  It's where I find out about most indie games I follow.

Best of luck finding time to work on the project!

[zoq]

Glad to hear you haven't given up on the project, because it sounds really cool.  As far as a communication/update platform goes, you might also consider IndieDB if you haven't already.  It's free and a pretty good community for indie game devs.  It's where I find out about most indie games I follow.

Best of luck finding time to work on the project!

Thanks for the tip about IndieDB! I kind of knew about it, but still somehow managed to not consider it. Having a nice platform for updates and so on might also be motivating I gotta look into it more carefully.

[Triturus]

I just found out about your project and I must say it looks very interesting. Good luck on it, as it's quite an ambitious task!

[Garthy]

I'm also watching the thread for developments too. I hope things go well.