Thruster Effects and Autopilot Docking news - Outlier: Open Skies

Intro
In the previous news article I told you all about how I've been porting stuff from High Albedo, now I want to show some of it in action. Specifically, I want to show off the docking code to demonstrate the AI's ability to path find through the universe. In addition, I have added thruster effects that add a nice visual touch to the game.

Thrusters
In Outlier, you will keep drifting until acted on by another force, which is either going to be your engine or something you've collided with. When firing the engine, the player will now be treated to a nice thruster effect.

The above image nicely shows a Sparrow firing its forward and rear thrusters. When you issue a command to accelerate, your ship automatically fires the correct thrusters! These thrusters are hardpointed to the ship.

This is a very nice touch of graphical flare to the game because it matches the physics so well. Although Outlier currently only knows how to handle forward and aft thrusters, I want to add other types so that it can correctly model a ship with 6 degrees of freedom, and apply the correct visual effect to match.

Speaking of hardpointing, here is a Sparrow with its debug hardpoint indicators turned on so you can see where everything goes. It has 2 mounts for cannons, and firing points for forward and aft thrusters. The hardpointing system is node based, and correctly accounts for translation, rotation, and even scaling.

And here comes my disclaimer: All models and textures are placeholders. Later in development I plan to pay someone to make higher quality ones, because these models are terrible for 1995 let alone 2014.

Docking Autopilot
The autopilot code has come along nicely. Most of it is directly from High Albedo, but some functions required total rewrites for a 3D world. Specifically, a new function was needed to determine the correct combination of pitch, yaw, and roll maneuvers to orient the ship to face a target.

In this image you can see the result: Remotely trading with a station you've docked one of your ships at. Like in High Albedo, you will be able to remotely order ships to trade and fight in order to achieve your goals.

The autopilot code isn't perfect, but it does consistently get where it needs to go. Getting all the autopilot bugs out of High Albedo took months of work and testing, so I expect the same here. My advantage here, however, is that I am using a lot of the solid and tested High Albedo pathfinding code.

Feedback
Work is proceeding at a quick pace, and I haven't encountered any serious issues so far. Since the autopilot code is working well enough now, I will now be able to port the combat AI from High Albedo to Outlier.

This game is in early development, and you are all in on the ground floor. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to leave them here or email me at masternerdguy@yahoo.com . I appreciate your feedback!