I’m making a note here, huge success…
A stack of crates thrown across the landscape by a blast wave.
So, firstly I’d like to announce, in case anybody was doubting that I am, in fact, still working on OpenLander. I’ve been a bit distracted for a while by doing mapping for OpenStreetMap and my normal “day job” / research position working on virtualisation and the Linux kernel. I found time recently to implement an improved weapon for OpenLander, which is something I’ve been meaning to tackle for a while.
The laser beam I was using before always looked a bit puny and was also pretty difficult to aim. The way I see it there are two major problems with aiming in a 3D gravity game:
- perspective makes it hard to tell where you’re aiming (unless you opt for a first person view, which makes it hard to fly)
- you’re continually doing course corrections in order to stay in the air, which disrupts your aim
My solution to this was a weapon which did more area damage, through a shockwave. It also made sense to choose a weapon that made better use of the physics engine. Lasers didn’t really qualify on either score, guided missiles might be OK but what I eventually settled for was a mortar-type weapon. I think this fits really well with the general gameplay:
- it does area damage so you can be less accurate
- shockwaves provide more interesting visuals and more interesting gameplay, since things get thrown about by them
- you don’t have to exactly face your target, you can point upwards and fire a bomb along an arc – this fits the flying characteristics quite well
- there’s lots more opportunities for interesting physics: you can lob bombs over hills, you can vary your range by changing the firing arc, you can increase range by accelerating before launching a bomb, you receive a backwards recoil impulse every time you fire which you may have to compensate for
All of these make the mortar a much more satisfying weapon than the laser. With a translucent explosion shockwave it also looks much better even if you don’t manage to hit anything 
I’ve been playing around with shooting stuff and it’s pretty fun: it’s especially good hitting a bit pile of crates and watching them go flying and tumbling over each other.
I’ve put a gameplay video on YouTube that demonstrates this effect. I’ve attempted to put this on Vimeo but they seem to be having converter problems at the moment 
It’s nice to have been able to do some more coding on OpenLander and feel like I’m still making progress. Soya3D is really powerful and fun to work with, as is Python. It’s ideal for doing spare time development where I don’t have much energy for faffing about with infrastructural things.
Tags: computer game, game, gravity, gravity game, lander, lunar lander, openlander, physics, screenshot, Video, video game, vimeo, youtube
