Since 0.15: work in progress

This work is in the current development build as of October 10. It has not been tagged as a release, and some of it may change before the next one. On October 9 we picked the game’s name, Wreckwing, from a shortlist, and the title screen, boot sequence and credits now use it.

Game

• An elevated freeway curves through a new, wider 375 m city and runs out past its edge. It has two lanes each way, lane lines, lamps, and a cloverleaf of four solid loop ramps with merge lanes. It has its own post.
• Every ship is twice as tough, and a shield now takes a blow whole, so fights that had stalled in draws end again. That also has its own post.
• An airbrake, added after a play test on October 9, turns a boosting ship onto a new line without stopping. From 70 m/s, a 90° turn takes 0.18 s where it took 0.93 s.
• A Hood camera shows the ship’s nose from just above the cockpit, and first-person views cut to a crash camera when the ship goes down.
• A damage panel lists the ship’s parts with a bar each. We chose a list over a drawing so every design gets one.
• The autocannon snaps its aim to a lead indicator within about 3°. A lock holds its target and takes the nearest enemy in a line, with tones for the grab and the lock. The missile pod reloads in 4.5 s and sounds a tone when one is ready.
• A floor that comes down on a ship crushes it. We wanted a falling building to hurt much more. A slab 4.7 times the ship’s weight finishes it in about three seconds.
• A ship that loses parts collides as what is left of it, and a wing tip comes off with the engine it hangs from. A wreck throws 8 to 10 bodies where it threw 109 to 118.
• More player ships can be chosen in Settings. One is the Sniper, built for range: very fast in a sprint and slow to turn. It glances off walls, and a head-on hit bounces it back, because crashing through a building at that speed would wreck it. Its model is drawn with textures per part. At 3840 × 2160, six at full detail add 3.56 ms of GPU time.
• Enemy pilots back out of dead ends. In our tight city, the time a pilot held still fell from 23% to 4.4% and the longest hold from 55 s to 3.6 s. A mobility trait makes harder enemies move more.
• Each enemy flies by a profile of numbers for reaction time, aim error, aggression and self-preservation. In a round robin, a pilot that scores its goals beat the state machine it replaced. The trial decision model’s goal choices added nothing over the rules in that test, so its weight is zero for now.
• Cars flip and tumble in a blast, and a car whose fuel goes up throws off its hood, trunk, a door and a wheel.

Engine

• Rubble piles that erupt on their own, a physics mistake, now set off a secondary explosion.
• Trees have limbs and clumps of leaves, and sway when a blast’s wave reaches them. A trunk snaps where it was hit, and a close blast leaves a stump. Trees far from a blast stay standing.
• Fire and smoke follow the trial we picked on October 8 and 9, with smoke that rises with its heat, a mushroom cap and dark lumps.
• Recorded sounds replace synthesized ones for most blasts, cracks, crumbling, concrete landings and the beds under a collapse: 49 takes from 26 recordings, which we picked. Glass and the autocannon stay synthesized for now. A blast heard from far off is a rolling boom.
• New lighting includes a better ambient occlusion term, cloud shadows and daylight through broken facades. Smoke shadows are off until a fault on facades is fixed.

Tools

• A development journal with images records the interesting things as they happen, and posts here draw on it.