Published on 1/14/2012

The ordnance are flying all over the place. And it's just beautifull.

This morning I tweeted a picture of the first successful rocket smoke trails. That was a major milestone. By that time the controls were also about half way sorted, and I did a lot a of play testing through-out the day. But there was still more to do. A rocket is pointless if it can't hit anything, and the next step was to start blowing stuff up.

Without too much effort on content (I only made a new explosion particle map) I managed to get the explosions going, and soon after that the accurate hit testing followed. Fortunately, this far into the project, there's already a lot of fully functioning methods, and I really didn't have to write anything majorly new to achieve it.

All that remained was further play testing, and of course bugs. Some were small and some where pretty hard to figure out. For example, the rockets travel fast. Their speed is configured at 40 meters per second, and after failing to destroy targets that I thought I really did hit, I found that the hit testing condition is too simple. It tested how close the rocket was to the target to ascertain if it's explod'n time. But, on one frame it was just .045 units too far away, and on the next frame it was already past it, e.g. -3.5. Which meant I had to build in a prediction variable of where it will be on the next frame which is then used in confuction with the simple test.

Fortunately I managed to solve all the problems that I could uncover during all my testing, and boy, it's now really starting to look like war. On my test level the objects are pretty closely placed, so everything is within reach of your gun and rockets. At some point I had about 20 smoke plumes going up, and that's a big smile on my face...