The end of last year was somewhat unproductive for me on the planet front. I was looking back at my calendar today and see that I spent most of my time doing real life work and being a dad. I also spent a lot of free time playing games too instead of making them.
The two things I did work on that were planet related were OGE and Spacescape. I made the developer list for OGE, and I might be the only active developer for now, but I hope that changes soon. I spent most of my OGE developer time working on the RakNet networking and Bullet physics systems and have been trying to get a minimal networking example working with a small player controlled spaceship, some exploding mines and a planet. Let's just say that networking + physics debugging can be annoying and I had no idea that making a spaceship NOT have Newtonian physics in space would be so challenging! - more on that later, maybe.
Spacescape got some bug fixes and minor features and I added the CMake build system to ease the pain for new developers and for me each time I develop on a new machine, especially one with a different OS like OSX. I also got my first and only Spacescape donation woohoo! and a bunch of feature requests, support requests and compliments.
On the table for this year are:
- Finish the OGE networking space example
- Re-asses and tackle placing objects on planets (vegetation, buildings, players etc)
- Fix planet underwater shaders
- Add simple clouds to planets
- Make the networking space example into a small game
- Release the planet plugin source
- Port Spacescape to OSX
- Divide Spacescape into "basic" and "advanced" modes so it is loads easier to use for the casual user.
Other possibilities include:
- Use acko.net method for computing planet normal maps
- Figure out additional light maps so we can have lights on the dark side of the planet
- Re-asses how distance/scale is handled when approaching the limits.
- Form a team of like-minded individuals
Hope you have a great start to the new year!
