Impact Damage

Ship's masses change so much, it was getting pretty difficult to have a statistic on projectiles that appropriately communicated impact - the force of a projectile hitting your ship. Simply adding a force wasn't enough - small ships would reach ridiculous speeds while large ones would quickly not receive any. I also wanted stats to be as separated from looks as possible.

So now impact damage is reduced based on your ship's category. This means larger ship categories might be completely immune to the impact of small weapons. Impact also decreases global control of your ship which slowly comes back - reducing your turn rate and drag control. Ships receive the force, start moving and will have a bit of trouble controlling themselves after an impact.

Since categories are so important now (they determine basic movement capabilities), there's a little helper bar to show you how far you are from reaching the next category.

Finals are over, too!

Writing on your ship

Unity's new UI is fantastic for creating interfaces, but it turns out it's also very useful for general text in 3D space. It only took a few hours but I have surface text on blocks, so you can write the name of your ship or anything really anywhere on a block.

Writing the name of the ship

It even supports rich text so you can change the color!

Just another fun little feature for personalizing your ship. It supports regular rectangular blocks and normal slopes (so no corners).

Finals are almost over, so these little bits and a lot of tweaking are the most I can do at the moment.

Asteroid fields and ship wrecks

Some battles are heavier than others - they will leave wreckage that a player can salvage. Of course, you have to get there before any other scavenger. Ship wrecks are based on the ships made by players.

I also made some improvements to the asteroid layouts - asteroids close together will have smaller asteroids in between them. Basically there's more asteroids and they're placed in a more artistic way in the sector.

Other upgrades this week are to ship damage effects - not done yet, but with Unity 5.3 I can do some more interesting effects on ships and other meshes.

New Shield Effect and World Map

Decided to put some time into a real shield impact effect, and here's the result.

Also made the world map a bit more pleasant to use. Definitely feels at least a little prettier too.

When in local sector mode...

... and when in world map mode.