ATTN: Aaron Ash - any news on your ASP engine?

Bob The Great · Post by **Bob The Great** » 2002-12-25 09:52pm

Haven't heard too much about the ASP engine lately. How's it going?

Laughing Mechanicus · Post by **Laughing Mechanicus** » 2002-12-26 08:36am

Work is progressing well on it, I've been keeping quiet on purpose really. I don't want to end up bringing hoards of "me too" fanboys to SD.net which is why I've held off on posting regular updates (but also cuz I want the first tech demo to be a surprise

). As a quick update though, we have vertex-shading, per-pixel shading and bump-mapping all finished along with the code neccesary to load "entities" into the simulation, basic physics are also in and I think our code monkey just finished adding some more advanced physics (like relativistic speeds and properly working planetary orbits).

As you know we also decided that with the change over to a simulation instead of a game we would make a few design changes. It will no longer have the complicated system for the bridge we originally envisioned, firstly because it would be extremely complex to get it to feel right and secondly because we decided you should be able to command every ship in the game, and that would have meant making hundreds of different bridge models for each ship. Also to begin with we will be having more of a "skirmish" experience for the game in it's Alpha and Beta stage until we can get an actual campaign completed, so to begin with you'll be able to design your own scenarios or customize pre-set ones with whichever ships you would like and different locations etc... allowing us (and you) to test out any scenario you could want.

At the moment I'm playing about with an idea about how we are going to make all the ships models for the game. The idea is that we allow anyone who wants to to model any Star Wars ship they like for the ASP engine (this means EU fans could get their favorite ships in) we would check it to make sure it was high quality enough, then we do all the magic to actually get it into the game. We would still retain a group of modellers to go through the "main" ship types, but getting "outside help" would speed up the modelling process no end and gives us some nice diversity in models.

I really expected we would have had the first Alpha tech demo out by now, but the huge delay with DirectX 9 meant we couldnt yet, but we will release one as soon as we can make it pretty enough and stable enough to warrant it.

Bob The Great · Post by **Bob The Great** » 2002-12-26 12:42pm

Cool. Thanks for the update. I got curious since I just bought hegemonia, and it reminded me about this.

I'm kinda sorry to see the bridge control system go, but I see what you're saying about complexity and the difficulty in creating all the different models. Oh well; it still sounds great.

For models, I'm not sure if anyone mentioned this before, but the team making Star Wars: New Rebellion for Homeworld is almost done updating their models and they look extremely good. They might be willing to share for this project. If you want to take a look, their BB is here and the guy heading up the team is Zeelich.

Sounds like you're making some good progress. Good luck with the rest of it.