Flight of the Navigator(s)

This week I have been (largely) working on improving the autopilot course plotting, notably to improve the visuals when docking/undocking for both the player and NPC’s.

I got fed up of flying through the station geometry, and being taken on wild erratic loops before heading for the waypoints 🙂 It was like being on a badly designed roller coaster at times.

Right now (more or less) things run smoothly, with the AP’s (autopilots) able to avoid the station itself, and loop around it to head for the approach waypoints and then on into the docking bays themselves. All of this code is totally ‘generic’ – meaning I can plug a Docking Module into a large carrier vessel, space station, asteroid outpost, etc. and the AP will happily dock/undock without complaint. There is some polish left to do (such as smoothing the course plots a bit better, and also following moving waypoints for carrier vessels in transit), but overall this is another todo tickbox ticked!

The purple lines here are the courses, the (slightly) whiter lines are the trails from the NPC vessels following along the course to dock.

The autopilot course plotting at work whilst NPC’s dock…

I may even be happy enough to upload a video 😉 though the Hive station is looking a tad ‘ropey’ at the moment – as you can see in this screenshot – so we’ll see!

I’ve also finally started re-factoring some of the ‘make-it-work’ code from the HUD Scanner, though no one will ever notice this it makes my life easier going forward. Having said that, reworking it is inspiring some nice ideas to improve how it works with contacts registering/unregistering, so it’s all good 🙂

Insurmountable Odds Final-Ultimate-Final-Honest-Last-Ever edit is underway, at last! So far all the tweaks are minor grammatical, spacing and so on – I just need to get my head down and crack on with it.

And finally, worthy of mention – I’ve been nosing about for more 3D spaceship resources of late (because, like, I can never have enough!), and CGTrader.com looks very nice indeed. It has a good catalogue (from my spacey perspective at least) and also allows you to engage with the model author to ask for discounts, handy for tight-wads such as myself… 😉