[Mon, 20 Apr 2026]
Experimenting with different-sized cells, and first attempt at a different shape rendering within a single cell as shown in the current ship builder:
While I continue to think on ship options and find an artist, I can continue improving the ship builder. The next major hurdle to that is in building a 2D interface. Until now, it's all been egui; I'm not sure that's the route I'll go to production. Again, the appearance itself doesn't matter at this point - what I need now is to get a flexible framework in place.
[Wed, 22 Apr 2026]
The first significant interface I'll need to make sharp and user-friendly is the ship builder. Before I can plan that ship builder, I need a solid scope on ship composability.
With that, I decided to derail my interface plan with a few new cell types:
- Lantern (omnidirectional light)
- Spotlight (single face, directional light)
- Tow Hitch (for building trains of ships)
Towing will require a bit more effort to get a solid client-side synced animation in place. After that I may continue on skin options and focus a bit on aesthetics.
[Fri, 24 Apr 2026]
I hadn't considered resource sharing in towing, but it presents an interesting gameplay opportunity. So, instead of towing in the traditional sense, I'm exploring merged structures. That is, when connecting to another structure, you inherit all of that ship's cells. The resolver automatically rebalances for motor-control; and energy and weapons become shared.
That, and the code base has grown to ~75,000 lines, so some time needed to step back and clean up a bit.
After the refactor is done and new tow cell has wrapped up, I'm hoping to begin work on supporting multiple textures per on cells as well as some new cell shapes.
[Sat, 25 Apr 2026]
Towing (which needs a new name) is in good shape.
And I removed body-relative fields as they were just adding too much complexity everywhere. Between that and some pruning and consolidation, the code base is down to 60k LOC.
Also I got it running on Linux.