pegwars : political economic and galactic warfare

New Nebulae Recently I began replacing the old particle-based nebula standin with proper volumetric nebula shaders.  The nebulae need to be many and varied, and so I want to procedurally generate them like the rest of the universe.    After being introduced to some awesome volumetric nebula examples on ShaderToy, I thought I'd too have a play around with ray-tracing a noise field to create procedural nebulae.   The end result looks something like this : Ray Tracing a Noise Field The general algorithm for rendering a volumetric noise field: - for each pixel on the screen, cast a ray from far to near (or near to far based on your needs) - at each step, accumulate density by looking up procedural noise functions - in this case, a fractal brownian motion function. - return the accumulated density, to be manipulated for the final pixel colour. This is a very basic implementation of volumetric ray-tracing, and runs very slow for the output quality.  Optimising the shader to

I hope you all had a great 2018!  I've been hard at work on Pegwars whenever I get the time, which is not as often as I would like, and have made some great improvements that I'll detail over the coming weeks.   One such feature I have working now and would like to present a teaser of is Planetary Installations. Planetary Installations Imagine purchasing and equipping your frigate with some heavy planetary bombs, and seeking out an enemy planet. Hypering in, you orbit the planet with eyes out cockpit window for any valuable targets - depots, airports, perhaps even the enemy HQ.  Evading the orbital defences you plunge into the atmosphere over your target, only to discover ground-based defences surrounding it are now opening up on you.  You dodge and weave fearlessly through the laser artillery fire until expertly maneuvering into place to drop your bombs on the perfect trajectory to ultimately destroy the enemy installation, causing immediate political and economic damage t

Over the last 6 months I've been working almost exclusively on new adding gameplay elements to enrich the overall game environment.  Some are general concepts, applicable to the main universal sandbox.   Others are more specific and fill out the lore of the gameworld.   Others such as missions, factions etc. are still to come. Here are the last 6 months worth of gameplay concepts, in alphabetical order. Air Resistance When ships enter/leave atmospheres they encounter air resistance.   This is imparted as a drag on the physics of the ships, with the primary effects being reduction of top speed, and dampening of flight controls. Ships may or may not come with wings, be careful flying into a planetary atmosphere without wings! The intention is to impart air resistance to the damage model, causing ships entering an atmosphere too fast to burn up and be destroyed. Target speed is set at 1000 km/h, but due to air resistance, it is currently maxed out at around 400 Bounty

Here's a quick look at a prototype dashboard for spaceships.   Like everything else in the game so far, the artwork is 100% prototype.  In Pegwars, spaceships are like future cars, so I've modeled the prototype from an 80's classic sports car.   The 80's really was the bomb, I love it how car designers tried to get so futuristic for a period of time. The gauges, from left to right : - Hull Integrity - Shields - Engine Revs - (Top) Set Speed - (Bottom) Actual Speed - Current Gravity Forces - Power Usage - Power Available Left and right of the dash will be a couple of MFD's (multi-function displays) that the pilot can customise to display whatever info they like. Beneath the speed readouts are a couple of icons that I haven't used yet, but the idea is they will function as 'check engine' lights much like in cars today.  Expect that when you are under heavy fire and damage to see a whole row of bright red icons indicating your ship is about