Not as much visible progress as I would have liked; there is one of those “thanks for playing” exit screens now, and yes, I did make that first test flight mentioned in my last post! Not very interesting at that point, but at least, I could experiment a little with Asteroids style control (rotate + thrust) vs the classic Kobo Deluxe style controls (aim and go in the direction indicated).

Right now, I have a control system that’s much like that of Kobo Deluxe, but the ship is actually driven by physics (ie mass, inertia, forces, acceleration etc), using a set of thrusters for power and control.

The advantage of using actual physics is that I get that nice, smooth, realistic feel, along with actual data to use for rendering the ship and thruster flames. Also, I can very easily have the ship respond sensibly to projectile impact, collisions and whatnot; just apply the forces and let the physics deal with it.

The downside is that “real” physics demands real control engineering! Typical naïve methods will only have the ship wobble uncontrollably, just as it would in real life. Fortunately, I’ve spent some 12 years doing control engineering for a living, so I can probably figure that part out. 😉

Oh, the ship has cannons too! 😀 Two sets even; one that’s much like the forward cannon from the old Kobo Mk I (the ship in Kobo Deluxe, that is), and one that spews out a massive, cool (er, I mean hot…) looking stream of… lava or something. The latter was just the result of my initial experiments, but it might show up somewhere, in some form.

I’m thinking of dropping the tail cannon of Kobo Mk I, and use two weapons instead; a primary nose cannon and secondary tail mounted device that drops a bunch of small bombs or similar. The latter would be mostly a defensive weapon, to get enemies off your tail. I’ll play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t – but first, I need some enemies…!