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.

Post a reply to this message