Pre-Order the Game!

Desura Digital Distribution

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Weapon Beams

I've fixed the ETA bug, and nearly finished fixing the last fleet UI bug. The final solution is eluding me at the moment. It's when dragging the ship selector scrollbar, it won't scroll down to the last ship in list, even though there's some gap between the scrollbar's scroll and the down arrow indicating that there's one more ship. However, the down arrow will successfully move down one more so you can still select the last ship. So at the moment, it's at low priority while I work on other stuff.


I've been investigating methods of drawing MoO 1 style of beams. When you fire a weapon, the beam is drawn programatically, then it either flashes different colors (stellar converter), or "streams" towards the target. I've been trying to figure out an efficient method of doing that, and was able to just now successfully do it! I can create the beam, then have it wrap around, and simply move the texture position so it looks like it's streaming.


Here's a screenshot of the test beams. The red beam will probably be the plasma beam, and the blue/cyan one would probably be ion cannon. I'm experimenting with different colors to see which looks nice. and saving those in the test program I created for this purpose.


1 comment:

  1. Every time I come here, things are looking sweeter and sweeter...

    ReplyDelete