Controls: W/S - Increase/decrease throttle. Z - Set throttle to maximum. X - Set throttle to zero. Note that Z and X can only move the throttle as fast as W/S, they just keep moving it until it hits max/min. A/D - Fire maneuvering thrusters. Note that it takes an equal amount of time to slow your spin as it takes to attain it - maneuvering will be challenging. T - Toggle SAS (automatic rotation halting). R - Toggle RCS (maneuvering thrusters). Note that the ship has no rotation control system other than the RCS and engine thrust vectoring control, so you will not be able to change your rotation speed with the engine powered down and the RCS disabled. Arrow keys - translate forward/back/left/right using translational RCS thrusters. Autosteering Controls: Your ship has some computer-aided guidance capability. This system is not perfect and at this time does no more than orient your ship automatically, but it may be useful for players who experience frustration when turning the ship. When using these controls, a target vector will be created, and the ship will then be rotated with RCS until it is aligned exactly with the target vector. Click - aim towards mouse-pointer. I - aim along prograde vector, the direction in which you are travelling. K - aim along retrograde vector, the direction opposite that in which you are travelling (useful for slowing down). J/L - aim along left/right radial vector, perpendicular to the direction of travel. Useful for turning, but remember to realign frequently during turns to ensure accuracy.
This is a very early release of something that will eventually be a game. At the moment, it's just a bit of a preliminary showcase of my new torchship sprite, some engine flare effects, and my latest inverse-square-law compliant background stars. I also like the way the autosteering function is turning out, but it's definitely not done yet. Known bugs: -RCS thrusters often don't show when turning automatically. There appears to be /nothing/ I can do about this; the thrusters are explicitly set to show when rotating, yet they decide not to anyway in direct violation of the code blocks. If you look at the code yourself and think that I actually made a mistake, please let me know. -click-to-rotate often breaks. -the rotation marker often vanishes too early, or doesn't even show at all. This is also an instance of code blocks being repeatedly and explicitly ignored, so I have no control over it. The music track in this project is "Dust" from the Interstellar soundtrack. Changelog: 12/24/14 (morning) -Initial release (evening) -Added engine effects, RCS, toggleable SAS, scalable throttle, thrust vectoring, RCS/SAS buttons, background stars. -Adjusted background stars so that their movement speed is proportional to the inverse square of their apparent distance rather than just the inverse, improving depth illusion. -Adjusted star population distribution to include more dim/distant stars than close ones, further improving depth illusion. 12/25/14 (Merry Christmas!) (morning) -Added auto-orientation control - now you can click to point the ship in a specific direction. (evening) -Added speed indicator in upper left. -Squashed all the speed indicator bugs. Yes, it's possible to go faster than light if you leave it going for long enough, but this will be fixed soon. -Revamped auto-orientation, making it more precise and adding the ability to align with prograde/retrograde/radial velocity vectors. -Made clicking to auto-orient only activate if the mouse is at least /sort of/ close to the stage. -Added nav wheel in upper right, showing the ship's heading in blue and the prograde velocity vector in green. -Rescaled star motion speed, making stars still appear somewhat star-like even at very high velocities. -Added translational maneuvering thrusters. These aren't really useful yet, but might be eventually (docking!) -Added music. No volume/mute option yet, unfortunately, but that's coming as soon as I have time. 01/02/15 (morning) -Added a new, higher-resolution engine flare sprite. (evening) -Doubled the number of background stars, and improved their appearance somewhat. If your computer runs slow, you can decrease the number of times the sprite copies itself. -Tried and failed to make star motion increase non-linearly, allowing them to remain coherent at higher speeds. Floating-point errors seem to be a problem here. -Made star cloning run atomically as a function (with no screen refresh between clone events) 01/03/15 (afternoon) -Halved number of stars, bringing it back down to 100. 200 looked amazing, but holy cow did it make my computer run hot. If you're running a mad gaming box (or anything with a fast CPU), feel free to turn it back up; it's worth it. -Fixed a bug that made adjusting the throttle with W/S impossible after using the X key. -Made engine ten times as powerful but 1/10th as fast to spool up/down. Eventually, this will be replaced by a "multi-stage" engine system where the engine can switch to more powerful modes after running above a certain intensity for a certain time. Developer's Note: When increasing engine power (for remixes etc.), do NOT add a coefficient to the first blocks in the ship sprite or change the limits of the "thrustpower" variable; this will result in floating-point rounding errors and erratic motion. Instead, change how fast the stars move and add a coefficient to the variable "Speed" to adjust the speed readout accordingly. (evening) -Finally got non-linear star motion by overhauling the scripts controlling them. A small change in speed will see a big change in star scrolling at low speed, but at higher speed, the background won't accelerate as fast (background star speed is proportional to the square root of true speed), thus allowing the stars to remain sanely visible even when moving very fast. This feature is still experimental, and may result in substantial jerkiness due to the extensive number of square-root calculations being done every second, but it's a start. -Cleaned up some stuff related to autosteering. The marker should break less often now, and aborting a rotation will break the autosteering system less often. -Continued trying to fix the problem where thruster flares refuse to show. Failed. Can as yet find absolutely no reason for the problem; it just decides to happen.
