So after doing some general testing of CIC I noticed that my environment mapping wasn’t actually working as it should be.  I spent quite a bit of time looking through my code and the examples I had used when putting together my HLSL shader.  The problem was the ray I was using to look into my environment map was wrong and so while it looked ok; it was just a coincidence that it looked similar to the expected result, when in fact it was completely wrong.  I’ve since updated that and when I get some spare time I will email the author of the code snippet I was referencing who also had the same problem.

I’ve also been working on the some multiplayer components ready for the alpha test in the next few weeks.  You can now see which section (offence, defence etc) the other players in your ship are currently working in.  That way if you know ‘Bob’ is working in defence there’s a good chance you should hop into offence and start launching missile at the enemy.  I’ve also updated the AI so every player in the ship can turn on/off the AI for each section of the ship and everyone can see the same current values.

That’s about it for now.  I’m trying to work out what I should do with the 3D models in the game.  I’d like to pay an artist to do some really nice models however I’m not sure if it’s worth doing at the moment.  I’ll leave my dodgy models for now, however if you know of anyone that might be interested please shoot me an email.  Don’t forget to sign up to the alpha test email list if you haven’t done so already.  I’ll be putting up some tutorials on how to use CIC ready for the alpha test however I’ll only be allowing those in the mailing list to download a copy of CIC and play it.