Here are the remnants of a large number of Tie Fighters after being blown to bits in a session of . After flying around shooting things for a while I noticed that the frame rate was starting to drop, and wondered how many bits and pieces were still spinning off into the void. So, invoking the god-like power of the programmer, I collected them all into one spot and fused them into a dense junk ball. It’s pretty isn’t it? It’s got about a zillion polygons in it, and having them all on screen like this makes the system run like a remarkably slow dog.

Slim Pickings

The search for a decent [and playable] space sim continues… What I’ve been looking at ranges from pretty ordinary to downright awful. Is the genre dead? Don’t people think "space ships" when they think of video games? Or maybe I’m just showing my age here. If I don’t find one soon George may find itself back in number one position [on my project list]. It really needs a new name though.

My solemn promise of what will NOT be featured in a space game of my creation, assuming I go ahead with this [which I won’t, because it’s a terrible waste of resources and how the hell am I ever going to make any money working on a big project like this, but hypothetically…]:

• Viscous space - Any externally applied acceleration [or deceleration] will have a credible explanation.
• Space ships designed to look like some kind of metal animal painted grey and trimmed with yellow black danger stripes.
• Pixel sized stars that actually jiggle when you move your view point - Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
• A plot which sets you up as a rookie pilot who inexeplicably gets sent out on very tedious missions against people with political differences
• Bad voice actors playing your recruiter/commander/wingman and talking that stupid generic tough talk without a trace of irony.
• More proper nouns than is absolutely necessary - If you’re like me, you rapidly glaze over whenever the talking head representing the CO starts yapping about how the rebel Zirconian Alliance, who are flying Les Miserables class military transports broke away from the Aardvarkian Federation…
• Onboard computers that are so smart they can show you the enemy ship from any angle in full color; they can tell you its shield status with less than a 1% error margin; they can show you where to aim… and yet they can’t aim for you!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2003 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.