DarkVoid Online

 

 
Well I finally got it playable. This is just a little demo of the flight mechanics (no shooting, no multiplayer, no collision detection). There are some other ships and a few weapons (to look at) as examples of the art work I've got to play with. The controls are all detailed on the play now page.

Enjoy

Made some reasonable progress today. Players can now move about the scene. It's not flying yet, lots of physics to do first, but it's movement. Got a little location readout on the screen too, it's easy to get lost if you don't know where you are .

The new ardor3d client

A chase in the ardor implementation

It's fantastic what some nice art can do for enthusiasm and apparent quality.

Well, I've done it again, thrown away the old code and started afresh. There were some big mistakes in the last version. Lesson learned. I'm looking at ardor3d this time as the rendering engine. I'm currently working on the 3ds max converter. I'm managed to get hold of some models from 3drt which has given me some motivation .

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

I've also added 'wasd' controls, just do the same as the cursor keys, but it was requested and easy . 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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Crashing in to a barrel and lighting the shields up

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 .

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

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

Shields are next I think

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 .

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

And it's all uploaded and webstartable

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

Enjoy!

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.

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

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.