I was hoping to get more "stuff" in the area generation this week but it turns out I needed to do build infrastructure to get that to work correctly.  Got that done though so hopefully next week.

 In the mean time:

 Check out the procedural generation of the asteroid meshes.  Shouldn't have to worry about exploring the same asteroid twice!

Working on a procedural mesh. There are a couple things I would like to try to use these with, but I thought someone might find it interesting.

 Don't forget to check out the Pre-Alpha Tech Demo at:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/forge-on/downloads/pre-alpha-tech-demo1

I have all of the pieces in that I wanted for the pre-alpha tech demo I will be releasing. Here is a brief preview of the gameplay. The demo should be available in a bit at IndieDB.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/forge-on

Hrm, well I started out this week thinking I would try to get the enemy ships loading in smoothly but turns out they are a little too computationally expensive to do that. So down the rabbit hole I went; I managed to build a threaded system that will generate (and store!) the ship parts dynamically. What does this mean? no more hitches on the main thread for one. But as a big fat bonus shared meshes!

All that being said, there's not much I can actually show regarding that, but I did manage to come up with a few improvements to the build system I think you may enjoy. I've added rotations and mirroring which I believe vastly improves the overall build system. I suspect mirroring will be on by default, perhaps non-toggle-able. Any thoughts?

Thrusters are now built based on core placement! Each core will provide thrust based on where and how it's positioned.

Added another part variation, still some work to do but I'm happy with it so far.

 The parts of the game I have been working on the last little while have primarily been precursor to work on the AI. Getting ships generating, engines working and placing correctly and so on. So I really hope to be able to get some AI work done in the next couple weeks. Once I have combat working and maybe a temporary inventory system up and running (and some sfx) I will be looking at making a test build to see what everyone thinks of the core mechanics.

Random ship generation this week, so that I will have something to work with when programming the AI. Movement code should now be at the point where it just needs a bit of polish. I'm very happy about this, you have no idea!

 I have decided on what to do regarding the engine generation. The engines will be components just like weapons or shields. The player will pick up engine cores rather than the whole engine. These cores when placed together will generated a more complex engine structure similar to what I have in the video here. I would like to have some mobility in the engines as well so I may end up making a component that will direct thrust, not sure on this yet but it would be a nice addition.

 So much to do, so much to do. Anyway random enemy ship generation is going well. Check out some of these new procedural creations.

Connection areas are now able to support multiple connections. This important for making more complex ship designs but it also will allow the player to augment their ships components. I will be adding more part types as development progresses. Anything you would like to see? I have had a couple suggestions (1) Discs - Like a flattened sphere. (2) Hard-Edged Hex/Oct Prisms.

Still needs polish and there are number of glitches to fix, but the core mechanics of the game are really starting to come together.

I'm very interested in hear anyone's opinions/suggestions on the build mechanics, or really anything else you might like to see out of a this game. Thanks!

The asteroid is generated using a single mesh, not currently using a chunk-based system however that is possible with this technique.

Each voxel's shape is determined by the voxels surrounding it and where reasonable mesh vertices are shared.  It gets a little complicated sharing verts so I opted to only share a few of them between voxels.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure if this method will be feasible in the long run but I like the potential.  I would like for the voxels to form more intelligently; creating slopes when attached to two voxels at perpendicular intersections for instance.  The reason I haven't done this yet is that it would cause the voxels to "snap" back when the corresponding neighbors are destroyed.  I have considered trying to get the voxels to mainain their "minimum" shape in each direction; it might solve the problem but I will have to give it some more thought.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any thoughts on a solution to this problem.

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Let me know what you think. Cheers!