Monday, September 27, 2010

Leaving the Home World

Galactic Throne's map generator now generates an empire for the player and automatically centers on Earth, the Human Empire's capital planet.

It also now keeps the empires' knowledge of the galaxy separate from the actual galaxy data, allowing the player and AIs to have incomplete knowledge. We might know a star's color simply because it is visible from Earth, but we need to explore it to determine what kind of planet there is. Some stars will not be visible from Earth, due to astronomical dust clouds for instance, and will need to be discovered with space craft or seen from another planet.

I have switched over to pre-multiplied alpha in the renderer, but the textures are not ready for that, so no screen shot today. I have also made a plan to speed up the renderer. It runs very well on slower graphics cards, while ironically going slow on my very fast PC. I think this happens because it sends a separate polygon batch for each star. I have decided to render everything with little square images and pre-multiplied alpha, so I can send them as a single batch of quads.

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