Day 3 - balls + walls

I noticed yesterday's post got about 200 views - awesome! Thanks for checking my stuff out :)

Today I worked on shooting and collision.


 I also changed the camera view to orthographic. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I want to go back and try a perspective view with a shorter FOV so there's not *much* distortion at the edges of the screen, but I think I do want some. Maybe. I can certainly make the environment "look 3d" in a few different ways, but I think being able to see the environment with some perspective distortion would be handy.

I also got multiple controllers working, I think. I don't have a second controller handy so I can't test it, but you can assign a controller index to a ship, so I suspect it works.

The collision routine is as simple as it gets - for movement, raycast against the level geometry and respond accordingly. You can certainly break it if you move slowly into a wall, and I've seen bullets fly through walls. I *think* this is only due to precision errors, so I need to add a little epsilon so when you cast a ray, the ray 'backs up' by an epsilon before doing the raycast. Hopefully that makes it rock solid, but it's possible I'm missing something.

Actually, I think it would be better to move away from a raycast to a swept-sphere test. This will build in a rather large epsilon (the sphere radius), and will solve the problem I have of the ship/bullets clipping into walls until their center point hits. So I just need a swept sphere vs triangle intersection test, and I should be good to go. I won't have ChristerE's book handy until the weekend, so I might just try to derive it myself.

At this point I've actually completed everything on my 'initial todo' list. For the rest of the night I'd like to browse google images for reference art, to figure out some kind of style for the game. I like the abstract nonsense I wrote in the background shader, but I was also thinking of maybe doing something gadgety (I guess steam punk ish), but that would be pretty demanding on art requirements. I've had a couple artist friends offer to help, but I don't want to rely on that too heavily, especially for my first game where things are still very uncertain. I'm not even sure how many hours per week I'll be able to dedicate once I get back from Christmas break and get back to work. So, maybe gadgety for a future game.

So here's my current TODO list:
- iterate on art style
- build a next TODO list for gameplay