Hm, not many comments around, so I thought I'd give it a go.
Before I read the text, I was somewhat stumped. What are those green boxes,
those white lines, what are they for? Then I read the text and understood.
The problem with these animations is that I can't see why and how a ship
turns, and the shooting-lines don't help much either. Aside of that, the
movement looks very fluid and soft, I like that. You should model some
preliminary ships and bullets, add some bullet-hit-effects (even if its just
a little partice-explosion or -sparks), take care that the thrusters are
visible, and then you've got something really fancy for us to look at.
Its always complicated to show off some code using place-holders, cause all
*we* see are the place-holders, the only one with knowledge of the
complicated script behind that is *you*. Making the script visually pleasing
is what I've found is best for displaying some script. What I do is prepare
and experiment with placeholders, but when I want to post it, I use actual
objects, or at least some crude ones. After all, people can only comment on
looks, not on the script itself.

So, to wrap it up: nice and soft movement, but the objects lack some detail.
;-)

Regards,
Tim

PS: I hope you make some nifty Include, so that we all can create our own
battles and such. Would be even better if you'd make it that Users might set
the initial positions and orientations for a given amount of ships, and then
they can compete. That would be awesome! (Especially if Users might modify
the looks of their spacecraft)

-- 
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: no_lights (@) digitaltwilight.de

> See:
>
> http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~tomy/tbstest/tbstest.html
>
> (7 animations encoded using the DivX 5.0.2 codec)
>
> A while back, Slime posted a series of very swish automated space
> battle animations. The animations at the page above are test renders of a
> similar concept. In this system, the ships are subject to Newtonian
> mechanics,conservation of momentum etc, and change their orientation using
> "thrusters". Weapons fire is recorded and tracked by #reading and #writing
> a list of in-flight bolts every frame. Hits on ships are also recorded in
> this way, although at the moment nothing spectacular is done with the
> information.
>
> Frames in the "slow bullets" animation took 5 seconds each to render
> (averaged over 300 frames) most of which was probably spent reading in the
> weapons fire tracking file. Frames in the other animations took only a
> second each, typically (beam weapons are not saved from frame to frame).
>
> This is still work-in-progress at the moment. Only two rudimentary rules
are
> used to decide what a ship will do:
>
> * If a ship takes more than 50% damage, it will flee from the nearest
enemy
> * A ship will target the nearest enemy and attempt to fly towards it
>
> The camera control is currently experimental. Some animations take the
> dot-product averaged sum of spacecraft positions and use that to decide
> where to aim the camera. Some of the others use a fixed look_at position.
>
>
>


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