Progress

Well, shield effects are in, which means collision detection is in too. I've also managed to reduce the lag spikes that were happening when using a proper server.

Unfortunatly, I've also managed to 1/2 the frame rate with the addition of then new effects and the collision detection routines Smiling

I've also added 'wasd' controls, just do the same as the cursor keys, but it was requested and easy Smiling. I've also added the stabilisor function. If you are out of control, press and hold 'T' until you feel ready to take control again.

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Barrel strike sparks the shields
Crashing in to a barrel and lighting the shields up

Movement tests

Well, I *think* i've got basic movement nailed, it seems to fly nicely to me now. Feel free to 'play now' and try it Smiling.

Currently there are some diagnosic lines present, which show the fly by wire working under the hood Smiling

Velocity and thrust vector debug lines
Red/Green/Blue are local x/y/z axis, orange is current velocity vector, cyan is current thrust vector

Shields are next I think Smiling

Progress

Well I've managed to make quite good progress. I now have a basic audio system in place. I had some issues, but once I figured out that I need to use the same thread throughout my sound calls it all seems to work. I stream the audio right out of the jar files which means no loading time Smiling.

I've also added the roll feature so you can roll the craft.

And it's all uploaded and webstartable Smiling

It's currently sitting around 14 meg download, but 8 of that is models and music Smiling.

Enjoy!

Eye candy

I've been doing a lot of back end server type work on DVSF recently, ut I've had time to do some tweaks here and there also.

Ok, it's not exactly earth shattering, but I'm farly happy with it so far.

A while ago I discovered the Subsance LAF for Java, and the one of the themes seemed quite nice, so I played around and managed to get it in to DV. I've also looked in to GUI designers for swing apps, and found the formsdesigner for the goodies layout, it's not that bad and quite quickly a simple login screen was created.

Login screen

I then went on to reskin the standard screen options dialog, so it looks more in keeping with the theme

Large changes

Well I've been at it again as you can see from the subversion logs. I've updated the version of SGS I'm using, which revealed a bug in my log formatter. The major change is the client is now multi-threaded, the idea here is to take advantage of multi core processors. This has caused me to think about the architecture of the software a little more and I have managed to seperate the components a lot more and I am fairly happy with the result. I *should* be able to swap components, update them or add them quite easily in future.

First shot from JME engine

First shot from JME engine

First screen shot from the new (to darkvoid) jme rendering engine.

FSAA

Kev got FSAA working for his title 'Tilt'. Not one to be outdone, I thought I would give it a go. It's remarkably easy. It doesn't even seem to effect my frame rate that much Smiling.

Here are 2 images, one with, and one without the sample rate increased.

Enjoy

4 Samples for FSAA
With samples set to 4 some of the jaggies go away, particularly on the pilons on the ship.

Shot with no FSAA for comparison
No Anti Aliasing

New webstart version

There is a server running now.

The webstart version has been updated to connect to it. It does nothing, but it's there and talking. Smiling

The user Guest exists and you can stick anything in as the password for now.

Coo

I was playing in a blockade on puzzle pirates tonight and the flag i'm in use ventrilo for voice comms, which has no linux port. So I booted in to the OS of the beast. The blockade has been over for a while now, and in the calming down before I head to bead, I though I would try DV client. During the performance problems I was getting about 80fps. I managed to get this up to 196fps. On the same machine, windows is giving me 430fps!!!. The odd thing is, doom3 runs faster under linux on this laptop.

I'm all confused. Smiling

I'm currently looking at using SGS for the network code and back end.

Performance increase

At last.

I've been chasing a huge performance issue the last week or so and suddenly tonight I've fixed it. This has more than doubled my framerate at home. There as still tweaks to be made to allow for large combat, but that can wait till there is something to have a large combat in. I've done what I need too for now it seems.

New webstart version uploaded of course Smiling