[Week 10] Dogfighting, Sound & Effects

Dogfighting is solid. I find it nearly impossible to win in a 1v1 with equally matched ships. Patrols can also respond to stations:

• Patrol combat got a lot more expressive: pursuit, weapons hold, jinking, evasion, rear-awareness, boost passes, and last-ditch self-destruct behavior.
• Factions are in the mix now, which gives patrol ships a reason to care about who fired first instead of treating every fight as a private duel.
• Police response is starting to connect the environment together. Distress calls, police distress calls, and repair calls are becoming actual cells with behavior.
• Repair kept moving toward the economy loop as well: self-repairing stations, multi-repair-station support, repair call cells, and better station/fleet coordination.
• A lot of the rest was cleanup to make the above hold together: navigation fixes, NPC optimizations, integration profiling, energy fixes, warp alignment fixes, collision during warp acceleration, save/load work, and SDL/gamepad infra.

The main shift is that the sandbox feels more integrated now, and self-annealing behavior gives us a loop. Damage or weapons fire can trigger calls, calls can bring a response, and that response can feed back into repair.

I spent the next couple of days on feel.

• Audio is in now: background music support, buses, spatial one-shot effects, and event throttling so nearby sounds win when a lot happens at once.
• Blaster fire and hits have better data now. Muzzle flashes, sparks, impacts, and cell-destruction effects can line up with the actual cell that fired or got hit.
• Thrusters got more personality too: exhaust plumes, glare, boost response, and damaged-engine smoke/leaks.
• Pursuit flight got another pass. Less fighting the ship, more intentional banking and motor headroom for turns.
• I backed off the fancy warp bubble path. Fast-moving station arrivals need the server to own the exact arrival, so warp kept the client presentation parts that are safe and moved the accuracy-critical parts back to the sim.
• Some of the less-visible work was config cleanup: repo defaults, VFX config, audio config, per-cell overrides, and a few larger structure cells.