Sunday, May 27, 2007

3D Flight Engine Prototype # 1

This is my first attempt at the flight engine for the game. The terrain is done with L3DT and exported to Torque as an Atlas terrain. The building is part of Tim Aste's Combo content pack I bought. The rest is stock Torque Game Engine Advanced. The space ship is a placeholder Belair Cruiser I made for another game. Enjoy!

Brave Prototype Flight Engine @ YouTube

Apologies for the low qual - but it's the best way to broadcast it versus bandwidth.

I've also been working on the design for the ship which is blogged here...

BAE-Hawk 271 Ideas

The idea is to have a ship you can reconfigure and based on your choice will determine how you try to win each level. I have also been thinking about AI. I'm going to have citizens and troops running around on the ground manning turrets, refuel bays and buildings, and they manage themselves. However aliens come down and grab them so you will have to protect the humans to keep your resources, and back-up weaponry ticking along.

I was thinking about the bit where you will have to rescue a snatched human. Most probably you shoot the alien taking it back to the mothership (think Defender). But when they fall, if you just grab them like in Defender, you will rip them to shreds - which I will let happen. What you have to do, to save them is match their descent speed and allow them to fall into your cargo bay at less than half a meter per second. Once you grab them safely you have to drop them where they can run back and man a building, vehicle or turret - should be interesting to program, but will make a cool game dynamic I'm hoping.

I'm having a fairly easy time sliding into TGEA from TGE, but there are some annoying bugs, such as tears in the Atlas terrain, no shadows from DIF's and limited view distance.

However I'm really digging the water, the extent of the terrain and playfield, the ease of adding shader effects and how quickly I was able to port my old flight code to the new engine.

Next I'm going to work on missiles and lasers and blowin' stuff up :)

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