Let there be Bogeys

bogeys
(click to enlarge)
It hasn’t been very productive these last few months. Got the usual family stuff that is, obviously, more important than this – but what I have done is experiment more with MyGUI and added bogey trackers to some mine objects.
The bogey trackers are actually 2D GUIe widgets and each corner of a box surrounding a mine is it’s own widget. The performance ain’t hot let me say that much. I’d like to also try 3D bogey trackers and actually put billboards in 3d space around the targets, but I kinda doubt that will be any faster.
I’ve also tried to smooth the input and framerate a bit more. In the process I implemented a mouse look system for the ships that is similar to the one in X3.
In the process I broke my multiplayer input so now client ships can’t move, and there is still a bit of jitter when moving fast, ugh. I plan on attempting to fix the network bug and then do some renovations to the lasers & thrusters. After that it’s some basic menus – joy! One of those menus should be a menu to jump to another planet or solar system, so that will open a whole new can ‘o worms.
Here’s a little vid I recorded – just shows the bogey tracker.

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4 comments to “Let there be Bogeys”
  1. How do you implement this?

    Some ideas if you’re not using them already:

    1. Create a viewport frustum and check if the “bogeys” are in the current view. If its not in view then it definately wont need a bogey Tracker.
    2. If its in the view then cast a collision ray from it to your camera view. If the collision ray intersects another object before the camera then something is blocking your view.
    3. Draw the bogey tracker.

    That seems the most effecient way without shaders.

    Other ways include:

    2. draw the objects using a shader pass. i.e bogey’s as a red dot and everything else black.
    3. Draw bogey trackers wherever there are red dots

  2. @Shannon This one does a frustum check and does not display the tracker for an object that is off screen, but it doesn’t do any ray collision checks yet. I’m thinking I might try the 3d sprite bogey tracker too and see if the performance is any better. Drawing 100 trackers on the HUD really slowed things down.

  3. Really liking your work especially your most handy Spacescape tool, it’s absolute gold when making space games. I’ve been using it for mockups in an Android 2D space shooter I’m working on, but I’m liking the results so much think they’re gonna stay. I’ve mentioned your tool on my blog here http://fundead.blogspot.com/ cheers!

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