Missile Controllers are done.

After "some" work, missiles actually fly, and home in to their targets. It turned out to be much harder than I thought they'd be. Most problems came from improper math calculations. Especially hard to track were bugs that were related to local coordinate system of the objects, which caused problems for missile rotations, spin, and control thrust. This in turn caused confusion in the controllers that did not receive correct missile status, and made wrong decision how to correct them.

What this means for bug fixing, is that there were multiple layers of interactions, so a digging was necessary to identify actual problems and not their results.

Man, I imagine how much work it took to implement control for real-life air missiles.

Here are missile trying to hit each other. Yeah, missiles at the moment are trying to hit anything you click on.

Missile updates

Missile controllers have been implemented to a certain degree. However, there is a bug, which causes them to improperly spin in the flight. It seems that spin is always around side axis (perpendicular to the target and lying in the plane parallel to the ground).

There is a bug where deletion of a target is not handled properly. I think I'm closed to nailing that one, though.

Missile Controllers and CrossHair

The framework for new missiles and their controllers have been finished. Crosshair have been added as well, which is the first time it's been added to the project. I wasn't planning to have them actually, but here is why I've added crosshair. The idea is that manual firing of missile is hard. To simplify aiming, I've decided to implement homing missiles. The crosshair will be used to point at the object you want to shoot, and the missile will follow the missile even if the object will be moving. Of course, homing missiles won't be perfect, and I expect plenty of cases when they will miss or hit an obstacle before reaching the target. This should make for some fine strategy and tactics.

Watch Out For Parasites!

Here is a funny bug, I've uncovered from working with latest missile framework. (It's a rewrite of old clunky system.) Those look like really nasty parasites, don't they? Got some spray to ward them off? :D Or maybe it is a new weapon? :DDD

Full size screenshot is here.

Jet Thruster laid off. Game logic continued.

Recently, I took a long and hard look at the jet tank. What I saw was that flying controls and mechanics have taken a lot time, but have not progressed to a usable state. So, I decided to leave it for now, and move on to everything else. I will come back to flying tank later after the core of the game play is done.

Game logic. The first thing to tackle is a better missile - homing missile. You don't need to guess the arc of its motion anymore. You just point at the object you want it to go, and press/click fire. The missile homes in to the target, though it may miss if the object does something tricky, such as hiding behind an obstacle, or maybe shoot the missile down.

Once the homing missile is implemented, I will work on creating a crosshair for aiming, add ray casting according to the position and orientation of your camera. Then the whole missile feature will be done. You will able to aim and send homing missile anywhere you want them to go.

Though, I will have to add an option to a homing missile to simply go in some direction, if you missed everything on the map, such as clicked on the sky or something. I'll think about that. 8)