Bug free? Never!
I am working on the solar system objects at the moment and when that is done I want to release another demo.
So far all the planets have LOD meshes and textures and i'm currently adding LOD meshes for the space ships (will do LOD textures for them soon) and soon will add some more different ship designs too.
The sun is simply an animated billboard and light source but looks good enough - and I have long period events in place (comets on elliptical orbits).
I have not started on the asteroids yet, that comes soon and will be an interesting challenge because I want a proper 360 degree belt that you can see all round from a distance and then fly into - and not just a field suspended in space like most games.
I also intend to include solar flares (why do no other games feature these they are an almost constant event !?) and then the demo will be about ready.
It is a monster application, and consequently I am having to make high / medium and low quality meshes and textures everytime I do anything new because it is such a power hungry game on full detail.
Currently i'm working out exactly how i'm going to do the scenery when you are flying / driving / walking planetside. I'm not sure how much detail the game will go into yet, I would like some flexibility in being able to enter hotels, bars, shops etc but obviously getting this much modelling done and actually working in one engine is going to take some work.
Just figuring out the fractal scenery is tough enough because I dont want to use matrixes (too poor visual quality). I have a very good .x object terrain mesh system (I think superior to terrains) but the texturing is not yet up to par - I am working to resolve this and the new Geoscape tool gave me an idea on exactly how to proceed earlier (their textures look better than the method I was investigating, and it looks easy enough for me to replicate - and I might even get my version working without the texture set bug in the Geoscape demo
).
So when I can finally roam around planets (if not yet as far as having civilisations on the planet surface) that will probably be demo 3 - however it's going to be a huge download.
The way things are going in terms of media for this project I think the final release might be on DVD !
Currently a ZIP of the directory is almost 30mb and there is more media to add before the next demo but thankfully not all of it will be required (I will only include 1 solar system).
This is the biggest project i've ever attempted and i'm hoping it is the culmination of all the years of work i've put into Terrascape. The new TerraX engine (which you can see in action later today in Transfusion) should make it possible - and if I fail then i'll just make a simpler space ship game and bag the rest of the development for a later project
God created the world in 7 days, but we're still waiting for the patch.
