I started today by adding event subscription for components, so now all my scripted components subscribe to the events they need, and thus components (both C++ and Lua scripted) will only get event calls when an event they have subscribed to occurs. This had a very good impact on performance!

I then started on some design thinking. I know I should have focused on optimizing collisions and adding more advanced collision detection routines, but I got inspired, so what can I do




So, the idea is that the scene must have a huge planet in the distance. You're flying through it's asteroid belt. The tunnel walls should hold textures that creates an illusion of a vast asteroid belt, and then I'll spawn asteroid sprites ahead of the camera that fly by (but can't be collided with) + the fully fledged 3D mesh asteroids that will spawn in your path, that you can shoot and collide with and have to navigate around.

Then, I started implementing a planet. That went fast. I just had to create a new Material XML for it, a new Entity XML, and a specialized fragment shader, and I could add it in the scene initialization script. To create an illusion of scale, but without killing my depth buffer, I added a component to it that maintains the Z distance to my spaceship, thus no matter how fast my spaceship moves, I'll never get closer to the planet... I really felt this illusion worked.

Next, I kind of felt that I needed to add a sun to the scene... it's a cool thing to have after all So I hacked a sprite from the net, and in it's shader (geometry and fragment) I added a distortion animation to it's texcoord lookup, making the sun appear as though it's wrought in fire. The sinus behavior is still a bit obvious, but it's better than just a static sprite image... but then I though... man, this would look so much more awesome if I had bloom post process filtering!

... so I started on a Post Process system... and I'm still working on it Man, I suck at staying true to my priority list!