Week 27 Update

by ⚡ Shockk on 2020-01-20

Welcome back to another Corporeality weekly update! This week has seen some great strides of progress so I’d like to get right into it.

Scheduler

As mentioned last week, we discovered a problem where the mouse wouldn’t rotate the camera at all when the framerate was lower than 25. I’m really pleased to announce that we now finally have a scheduler in the game engine. I’m still planning to write up a proper technical explanation of this issue, but long story short, we now have it all working perfectly!

Time of Flight

Having now written a scheduler, it was pretty trivial to extend it to also allow us to keep objects alive for a certain duration. What this means is that weapons fire can now be scheduled to despawn after a set amount of time. This is a huge bug fix, as previously any weapons fire would just stay alive… forever… which, given enough time, would eventually leak more and more until the system ran out of memory or caught fire or both at the same time.

Models

We’ve now integrated the new missile model we showcased last week into the game, so missiles look super slick now. Aside from that, 🐰 The Rabbit has created a new model for us to integrate once we implement multiple weapons for the game. We don’t have this in game yet, but check out the pre-rendered version!

Next Steps

Some progress has been made in the area of weapons fire collisions with ships and asteroids, now that we have a scheduler, although I’ve hit a roadblock and will probably need to redo what I’ve done in order for collisions to properly work (and despawn the bullets).

This is mainly due to the way that ‘despawns’ actually work in the engine. When we ‘despawn’ an object, what we’re actually doing is forgetting every reference to it. Objects are reference-counted, so as soon as the last reference goes out of scope, the object simply no longer exists.

Despite the slight setback, I’m fairly confident in being able to get this working very soon, and we’re intending on publishing a new release next week with all the additions we now have.