I've upgraded the client from Unity 4.6 to Unity 5.0. In doing so I also kicked the textures/materials up a notch and introduced lighting. I also finally made up my mind that I wasn't going to use artificial lighting in deep space. This does mean that it won't look like Star Trek (with bright white …
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January 2015 Update
I managed to get quite a lot done over Christmas and New Year. Each individual hull panel can now have it's own texture map and a big change is that other ships are now rendered in the same world space as the player's current ship.
New Client Software
As promised here is some footage of the new client software. This software will be open source so players can improve upon or even completely re-write it to make their own interfaces to their star ships.
Big Bang #2
As you may already know we have been busy rebuilding the client using the Unity Game Engine, but we have also been making some major changes with the server side to. In the original simulation we had 360 million star systems spread over one 3,000 light year long arm of the Milky Way. Well we have re…
Short Introduction to Starship VL
We have published a short introduction to Starship VL. Some of the footage is from the early prototype and some is from the new Unity engine.
Warp Speed
The calculations for warping the vessel through space have been completed. The big complication here is doing the required trigonometry on a number scale that ranges from 1 meter (for docking) all the way up to 10's of light years.
It should be noted that this simulation is intended to be about…
Let there be light!
Three hundred and sixty million stars just burst into life. Well, virtual stars anyway. The core program now contains a model of the area of space the rift is in. This area is 10,000 light years by 3,500 light years by 3,000 light years containing approximately 360 million star systems.
Ships can…
Website Outline Done
We've updated the website with descriptions of the bulk of the ships sub-systems and how the game will play. We've also started to define some of the major races who will populate the Rift. Now we will work on fleshing these out and bringing them to life in the code. Because the game is in such earl…
EFR Completed
The Emergency Fusion Reactor code has been completed in the test LCARS application. The Emergency Fusion Reactor generates about 1,000MW of power and is used to boot up the rest of the ships core functions (such as the warp core containment field). In dire circumstances it can be used to provide a s…
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