I spent most of Saturday wasting my time on code that I reverted. Long long hours were spent working on bloom effects and shadows for ships passing over each other. Eventually both were rejected. The bloom code simply didn’t look that good, and the shadow stuff proved to be hideously involved and likely very slow. I know people might assume you can do it simply by just rendering the ships to a separate render target complete with shadows, then slotting in the background later, but you can’t, due to laser and particle effects lying ‘between’ ships and also needing to be blended with the map background at render time.
Anyway… who cares :D
What I *have* got working is hulks for fighters. Previously a destroyed fighter was just obliterated by a fairly low res particle effect. The effect still needs improving, but now destroyed fighters linger as debris. Crucially, the fighter hulk maintains its momentum for a while, so they look like their engines just got shot out, and they also drift faster than the big lumbering cruiser hulks. This all looks a bit nicer than before where they just vanished. I also went through and got 4 variants of hulk done for each fighter.
Now I’m rendering out a few more loading screens, and later I’ll work on some improvements to particle stuff. Monday onwards will be ai-fleet design and general game balancing.