ColoursElite UK 2

The good thing about taking on a new job is preparation.  It covers a multitude of issues.  Take, for instance, the galaxy class enterprise.  It’s got the skin wrapped around it and as such, as the maps are quite large, you lose framerate by a big margin.  It was enough to alarm us if you had several of these ships flying around the starbase.

Still, the Soverign class Enterprise was built, but doesn’t have a skin wrapped, but instead has meshes attached and the model makes it’s own cover.  Result is a more detailed and less lossy craft that doesn’t take that much power to render.  So, we’re trying the same with the galaxy class one to make sure it’s not a fluke…

Since the engine is still in development, not much else has been happening apart from building the ships….

And I got married too….:)

Lots has happend since the last post.  I’ve been sorting out stuff for my impending wedding and some house improvements with a lot of help.  We now have a new path at the front of the house which will make access much easier and cleaner rather than walking all over the mud.

Buck has become a beta tester for the engine we are using.  One of the features is that they will be moving to 64bit calculations soon.  What does this mean? – Frigging big numbers for a start.

To put it into context, if we made a scale sun to earth solar system, the sun would end up being about 1.4 million pixels wide and the earth about 22,000 wide, a starbase would be about 47 pixels high and a shuttle 0.0012 pixels – or there about…. you get the idea.

Now, with 32bit numbers, your universe can only be as big as roughly 90,000,000 pixels – pretty small.  However, 64bit numbers gives you an extra 32 bits to play with, and this means 32 doublings of the existing number – which is enormous.
What does this mean? – it means you could genuinly build the universe to scale and have solar systems all over the place and genuinely fly from one place to another.

The galaxy is modelled, along with a starbase, shuttle, pereguin, and a couple of others, – the Enterprise E is being moddelled at the moment.

We’ve been talking more about how we perceive the game to play but really want you all to come up with your idea’s as no one can say we are right. – so – your comments are appreciated.