yeah mate i am. do not expect to see too much in the next few weeks or so though. i am working on it but i am working on back end stuff! i wont be able to show case much. to put it simply, i am working on items and inventory. first up will be engines, as that will link in nicely with what i have already. once i have engine 'items' working in the players inventory (to the point where he can store in inventory, buy from shop, sell to shop, or equip to ship) i can easily expand this to weapons, shields, turrets and anything else that can be equipped really.

currently i am also a little bit busy searching for a job. i live at home and have no income, so i have to jump through several loops to receive pay outs from the government till i get a job lol. ahh, melbourne..

ok, stripped the demo of shaders, and implemented banking. thats it for me tonight i think..3 am here in the land of oz new versions in the first post, links have changed.

i am personally pretty excited about how it turned out. it 'feels' really good now that the banking is implemented. it felt really light before but this sort of gave it a bit of weight, IMO. thoughts? the bank angle is fairly large (45 degrees) just to show what its like. its harder to spot at a lower value with nothing to compare to.

ah right.. well i am installing freelancer now (i've been going off of youtube videos and memory up until now, just found my cd) and i will have a look into it. must just be a camera thing though, because i distinctly remember that in multiplayer, players only turned along one axis, they didn't bank...i remember seeing players afk or typing, with their mouse off-center. their ships would just rotate on the Y axis, relative to the ship..

i understand exactly what you mean with the twitchyness. its overly sensitive. just had a brainwave, actually.. i think the amount the player should turn exponentially increases from the center going out to the edges of the screen... thing that would work well.. it gets more sensitive closer to the edge of the screen.. haha... just talking to myself, this is what i've been doing to get the camera working the way it does..so much fiddling.. argh!!

i will take the shaders off in the next build so there are less issues. they are stock ones that come with unity, and i am just trying to get some attention because a plain dev build will be alot less interesting than one with bloom etc haha :p we are all suckers for it, dont lie! plus i wanted to give a taste of what can be achieved with it

edit:

also missing stardust hey that will give you all the sense of movement needed. but all in good time..

might apply a 'debug' version of the stardust effect - just an effect i can slap on and delete after i am done testing..like the contrails..the contrails (when the game is complete) will be generated after the component scans its children and detects a contrail hard point..right now though, i just slapped them on to the wings for debugging

Hey guys, just wanted an official place to post news about the game i am working on, and this is the perfect place.

Gameplay will heavily be inspired by Freelancer. I am trying to minimic the controls as best i can. Everything works great right now, except (I feel, anyway) that the camera is a little off..its very hard to get it just right.. freelancer has such a specific feel. anyway, i don't know if thats a good thing or a bad thing so i will let you guys decide.

please give me some feed back on what you think of it so far (again, mainly just the 'feel' of it but any crits will do). and you are welcomed to ask any questions you wish.. i will try to answer them as best i can.

engine being used is Unity3 Pro.

current state of development: Setting down all the foundations..

web demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/Showcase/WebPlayer.html




Exe: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/SummerProjR2.zip

Dockbay Controls:
Click and drag LMB to move camera
N to spawn new ship
S to save ship
D to delete save data
L to load save
R to restart (preserves save data)
U to undock
Click on any component to deal 10 damage. Wings HP: 10, Body HP: 100
Keep mouse still for 2 seconds to activate 'idle mode' (Cycles through various camera angles every 10~ seconds)

Flight Controls:
W A S D to move
Move mouse around to look
X to reverse
Tab for thruster
Space to stabilize. (This is active by default, press space to begin moving!)
Z for engine cut
Click on any component to deal 10 damage. Wings HP: 10, Body HP: 100
U to re-enter the dock
Automaticly saves your ship state when re-entering the dock

wow really? it was literally like 5th thread down from the top, i didnt even bother checking dates thats unfortunate..so the projects dead? any word from them?

sounds like a solid system! haha. i had a similar thing going with a game engine i wrote for XNA. i would have a stack of 'scene' objects, that i would pop or push. worked very well for basic 2d games! was pretty solid too. push on a main menu scene...user clicks play/options/credits, push on the play/options/credits scene, player exits back - pop off the top scene and your back to where you came from. love designing the backends of engines. i have not done anything TOO major yet (I am studying game programming at Qantm College) and engine programming was next trimester, but i did manage to roll my own engine for XNA during the summer break.. so much fun.

unity handles gameobjects a little differently..i can only instantiate cookiecutter versions of each object, (prefabs) and only save floats, strings, ints, doubles, just basic data. this means i give the player a brand new ship each scene, and apply damage to it.

http://imageshack.us/m/190/3190/unledbx.png

the system is really cool, i reckon! i can assign what prefab gets spawned on destruction as well, so i can literally have half of a battleship snapping off mid battle if it recieves too much damage.. the component that is going to snap off (the front half, in this case) will call its destroy() function upon reaching 0 health. this spawns an explosion effect and instantiates a free-floating, broken version of the front half of the battleship.. how cool would that look!