Phew, well, after a few too many days break (erk, deadline looming!) I've got back into it. The "proximity alert" routines are running, and the game is a little more sprightly when shots are fired. Still, I'm a little concerned that this is gonna require a rather hi-spec machine when it's done. I guess we'll see. I hope not.
Mining Blasters (which I just mis-typed as Minging Blasters...) now function correctly. Asteroids are blasted into a random number of chunks if a mining laser is used on them. The cargo scoop can pick them up (slight change here to Elite... the player gets with 20 units of the object to be scooped and presses C to bring it on board) and in your hold appears "Minerals". These can then be sold by docking at any space station. Hoo-rah!
Targetting now works, pretty much the same as it did in Elite, ie letting an object pass through your sights. Targetted objects are denoted by an onscreen circle. If an untargetted object wanders into your crosshairs, and you aren't looking to target it, it'll be highlighted by a crosshair. I'll probably change it to a grey circle or something that's less intrusive. I would do it for every object on the screen, rather than whatever's close to your sights, but DB has way too slow 2d for that. The game still goes to a crawl when the starmap is brought up.
There's also a basic menu screen now, which will soon allow you to set your resolution, control device, and graphics settings. The game has been designed from the ground up to be tolerant of just about any resolution given to it. I've only tested it in a handful, so someone'll probably prove me wrong on that.
Explosions have been juiced up slightly. Still fairly tame, but the smoke now looks a tad more like smoke, and makes bigger clouds to encompass the destruction of an asteroid, at least better than it used to.
Three laser types are now working: Pulse Blaster, Mining Blaster (slower rate of fire than the Pulse, but a tad more powerful, and it can make asteroids produce scoopable debris) and the Heavy Blaster (relatively rapid fire, fast moving shots, and quite powerful).
Still got to do an equipment purchase screen, then a bit of a code cleanup, and then the hard stuff: other ships.
And then, after the short bugtesting cycle in history, I'l probably submit it.
I've been giving some more thought to what I want to do after the competition. Whether I make the deadline or not, I really want to try and run with this game and put some kickass stuff into it for you guys to play. If nothing else, the feedback would be valuable to me, even if everyone hates it.
No screenshots today, but hopefully there'll be some shiny new models to show off soon.
