Monday, December 14, 2009

Another small lander prototype update

Updates will likely continue to be slight in the time leading up to Christmas.

There is a new version of the lander prototype.

Changes:
  • Increased rocket thrust: main nozzle by 75%, steering jets by 150%.
  • Added inset rocket view in upper-right corner of screen; useful when zoomed out. This will likely be replaced or augmented by indicators displayed over the rocket's location in the main display, so you don't have to look elsewhere.
  • Altered camera framing algorithm to emphasize the interesting band of radii on the planet. It can be made smoother than it is; just haven't finished yet.
  • Limited full-scene antialiasing to 4X, rather than 8X. I got really bad performance on one of the machines I tested on so this is an attempt to improve that.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Heh. That's surprisingly fun just as is. Highly enjoyable piloting the ship up into caves.

http://files.slembcke.net/temp/screenshot_121409_110425.png
http://files.slembcke.net/temp/screenshot_121409_110537.png

James McNeill said...

Thanks for the screenshots. Looks like there is not antialiasing on your machine. Odder, there is no color on the ballistic trajectory plot. Of course, line primitives in D3D are not well supported by some drivers so I'll be replacing all that eventually, but I wonder if I'm not doing something right with that? Time to run the debug drivers again.

I want to forward the Print Screen button through to Windows so you can take screenshots without the help text on-screen; I'll have to figure out how to do that.