Well, I ain't been lazy.
First I got my cheesy 3d starfield-thingie working, so I can do 2.5d stuff with sprites for spaceships and spacestations and planets and crap.
It was actually a lot of work, that 3d translation and rotation stuff hurts my pretty little head, I couldn't just copy it from somewhere else 'cause nobody had one that could do forward-and-reverse and side-to-side and turning.
It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't sorta cheating to make it run fast wherever possible ('cause its a key thing for me that this whole mess
has to be able to work well on the crappiest computers) AND having to think about comparative camera position and stuff, that camera junk adds a flip-flop to everything that makes me want to take a nap ahaha.
Anyways that's all good, its all mouse for steering and I even got the vertical-takeoff-and-landing bumblebee-of-death descent style controls working.
There's no "roll" though, I might not add a "roll" to the thing, y'know, for a couple different reasons, like the way that kinda junk makes Ex-B sick, and it just confuses the hell out of folks who ain't good at flightsim stuff, and then there's the mechanical reasons, where browsers ain't too hot at rotating images and I could take the processing power it'd take to do that and put it somewhere else.
Plus big ship battles and the bumblebee-of-death-in-space style (which is sorta like flying a super-responsive helicopter, where you can move sideways back-and-forth and straight up-and-down quickly) don't really beg for old airplane crap like barrel-rolling anyways, y'know, I'm not really trying to make an arcade game (although I'm sorely tempted and sometimes some of that gets through and I add it as an option heh), I wanna do the "click on the space map and the ship autopilots there" and auto-target fire-and-forget-photon-torpedoes kinda crap, and having the ships automagically "align themselves to the solar plane" and whatever is good 'nuff for government work ahaha.
I'm still in the middle of blood-and-guts of the thing, deciding exactly how I want to do the computer systems interface (which is actually what this whole going-into-space mess sorta
accidentally evolved out of, I was working on the "command console" on the bridge of my terraforming tower slash time-machine slash-everything else, where you repair HAL and all that) and the controls for throttles and setting destinations and the transitions for landing on planets and spacestations and all the other junk that goes with this stuff, which is a lot of back-and-forth between doing the art for it and programming it, but its all a bunch of fun interactive-cartoon junk.
Plus its all a bunch of crap that my brother's kids are gonna
love heh.
Oh yah, they aren't "stars," they're uh... "particles of space dirt reflecting starlight" and "space bugs" or something ahaha.
Whatever man, y'know, you need
something to make you feel like you are swooshing along, up and down and all around through the soup of it in 3d.
And I just got the basic mechanical stuff for the EVE-style scrolling nebula skybox junk in the background working, I haven't actually made any tileable skybox pictures of my own, I was right in the middle of deciding if I should try to do some kinda blending and transparency trick to let folks add hubble pictures of weird stuff (or whatever) as a background for their own private solar systems and crap, although I kinda doubt that there'd be lots of folks who were into doing something like that (besides me, 'cause that'd make my life easier ahaha).
