The only visual thing added to the game recently is the draft 'targeting reticule' which is represented by another piece of amazing coder art. The player uses this to target items and AI in the world to get more information or to attack them. I had originally played with a roaming reticule that matched the location of an AI object but it didn't really work that well so I am sticking with a centrally placed system until something better comes to mind. Having the reticule in a consistent central position does present an interesting design challenge though. I want the player to be able to use it to discover what type of AI they are pointing at, it's level, its shield charge and what kind of cargo it is carrying. With the roaming reticule this was easy because the player could use the mouse pointer to click on the object they want to find out about and the reticule would follow that object but now it is central the mouse pointer clicking does not feel the same so I have to come up with another method such as always ray-casting down the centre point of the screen to match with whatever is in the central line or do a sort of auto lock on to the closest object. The ray-cast idea can cause problems with smaller object that might move in and out of the ray-cast at frequent intervals but that can be solved by keeping an object's information in place for a minimum amount of time.
) and had to do some quite extensive hackery to get smooth movement of small craft yet still maintain massive render distance for distant planetary bodies.
[url]http://www.eelpi.gotdns.org/blog.wiki.html#[[A%20matter%20of%20precision]][/url]
