Again a lot has happened since my last post and I’ll try and remember everything I’ve been doing since I last reported in. Firstly, with Cliff’s help I tested CIC over the internet and it worked without a hitch. All the messages were passed around correctly and considering I haven’t put any timing code in there was very little lag. I took a quick screenshot of the game we played against each other below:

I’ve been testing CIC at work quite a bit and getting people’s opinions as early as I can. Even with the extremely limited gameplay people can see the possibilities and are saying it looks like it could be quite fun. It’s always hard to get good feedback from friends as they are extremely biased, but I’m hoping most people will be honest if they have issues. I’ve been working quite a bit on fleshing out the gameplay of missile selection and interception. It’s all come together quite nicely and while it needs quite a bit of testing to iron out some issues, I’m happy with how it’s looking so far. Most of the features of the missile selection/interception have been implemented and I’m just about ready to start ‘phase 2’ of the defensive system. This section involves setting up the ‘passive’ defenses of the ship, such as where fighters should patrol the ship and where the ‘phalanx’ system should fire at incoming missiles. This will make choosing a path for the missile important and once complete will round out the first implementation of the offensive and defensive states.

I’ve also started on a little optimization of the dynamic vertex buffers so they are all grouped into a single large vertex buffer based on their material. This creates 4 extra vertices for each smoke trail in the form of 2 degenerate triangles however it means I can put the entire group into one ‘stripified’ dynamic vertex buffer which increases performance quite substantially (about 20fps bringing it up to 70 with a lot of missiles on the screen). There still needs to be quite a bit of optimization, however I’m simply going to analyze it so I’m aware of the trouble areas and leave the bulk of the optimizing until I reach my major milestone early next year.

That’s about all that’s happening, I’ll just give a quick shout out for Damian who’s released v0.5 of GLIntercept which I recommend to anyone writing an OpenGL app, or who would like to find out how their favourite OpenGL game does all it’s fancy effects. I had a lot of fun looking at Homeworld 2 and seeing they implemented their smoke trails in a similar way to mine :).

That’s about it, I’ll leave you with a riddle we had at the quiz night for our church Christmas party:
If 1.5 chickens lay 1.5 eggs in 1.5 days, how many chickens does it take to get 12 eggs in 6 days. It’s fairly easy but I enjoyed it as a brain teaser.