Mayfly Studio

Apparently you think I should just do what I want, so FINE. I’m using the asteroid shader with sharper highlights, since the additional surface detail isn’t actually especially attractive surface detail.

Anyway, the next thing I’ve been working on is mission design. As in Wing Commander, a mission is divided into a series of linked waypoints, each of which will (presumably someday) have some arbitrary selection of ships and various events. I’ve composed an XML format for defining all this stuff, and have it at least far enough along so all the background contents of the world, formerly hardcoded, are now scriptable: so above, we’ve got a region with a red supergiant star, asteroids, dust, and a certain number of background stars, all defined in XML. I did spend a bit of time intending to have each waypoint represent an actual location in space and all of the objects in the solar system be resized and positioned appropriately, but then I realized this was stupid overkill for a non open-world game and axed it. Instead, each waypoint stands alone. It’s trivial enough to copy what bits and pieces are needed to (say) make a series of waypoints approaching a planet, or whatever.

Additional note: since these waypoints are standalone, you won’t be able to manually fly from one to the next, which you could do in Wing Commander if you had lots of spare time and weren’t easily bored. I’ll call this out to the player by specifying “local” distances in, say, kilometers, and waypoint distances in Astronomical Units which won’t change no matter how long you manually fly towards them.