Turrets Debut

Turrets make their first playable appearance in today's update to my lunar-lander-on-a-disc game, available on its website.

In addition the rocket has now been outfitted with machineries of aggression: Press right mouse button to fire projectiles out of the rocket's nose, and B to drop a bomb. Bombs start out with the same velocity as the rocket so you can use your ballistic trajectory plot to see where they will go. The nose gun has its own new trajectory plot.

Various other things have been tweaked. The landing gear now uses Chipmunk's damped-spring constraints instead of doing the spring and damping in the step itself. The damping is significantly different between the two approaches; I've tried to tune it back to be similar to before, but with less bounciness. I've also made some semi-successful attempts to tune the landing gear shock movement range to prevent inversion when you hit it sideways, but it's still doable.

The rocket doesn't activate its orientation thrusters when either of its feet are touching the ground unless the main thruster is firing. This makes landings a bit more difficult since you cannot cancel unwanted rotation quite as easily. I might try having the orientation thrusters automatically switch to rotation cancellation once you touch ground if this feels too hard.

I tried and removed missiles that accelerate continuously. They look cool but they make the game really easy, so I'm still thinking about them.

Another change is that there is now a two-planet progression. The first planet has fewer caves and fewer astronauts. The second planet is the classic one.