Monday, January 7, 2008

Happens to the Best of Us

Well, I did a little digging into the issue of the high speed mass driver rounds missing their targets too often. I found out that it had nothing to do with the speed of the round or the guidance system. Turns out it was a stupid little defect: other missiles that I have tested have proximity fuses while mass driver rounds do not. When a missile gets close to its target (within its proximity fuse range), it watches to see if it is about to fly by the target. If so, then it detonates, figuring that it is as close to the target as it is going to get.

Since mass driver rounds don't have proximity fuses (or any type of warhead at all -- their kinetic energy is plenty of punch), they never detonated because I didn't write any code to detect an actual hit on the hull of the target. So I added code to detect a hit on the hull itself and now the mass drivers are back to being super deadly :) In fact, the way it is now, one hit from a mass driver will kill any of the ships I have set up. I will adjust this of course, its no much fun to die on your first hit (though it may be more realistic!).

Also, I have added a chat window as you can see in the following screenshot. I hope to be able to implement team chat as well as global chat.


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