Hi everyone! I hope you’re all doing well as spring begins. Let’s dive right into what was done during February!
Early during the month I posted a first trailer for Rocket Engineer (see on the Steam page). The reception was truly incredible and I was not ready for such positive comments and definitely converted into more motivation to continue the development despite the various challenges encountered so far. Thanks a lot to all of view for watching it!
One feature that is very important, I’d even say crucial for Rocket Engineer realism and that any rocket or physics based game have are collisions that results sometimes into explosion. That is what was added and was very straight forward. In consequence, parachutes were added to allow a capsule to come back to Earth safely after a landing on the Moon.
Also, a very important aspect is the map. Previously, the only things that were displayed were logos that showed the position of the planets, the rockets and rocket’s trajectories. However, this is not sufficient at all for even thinking about navigating to the Moon with an efficient rocket. Hence several functionalities were implemented:
- Rendering of the planet trajectory
- Rendering of the planet sphere of influence
- Detection of potential intercepts
The last item, detection of potential intercepts, was especially hard since it had to iterate and be efficient but a very good solution was found which is both efficient and precise.
This intercept detection feature also resulted in fixes for the hyperbolic trajectories for on rail orbits which were not calculated as expected.
Another core feature to the physics system that was implemented is to let the player control a previously launched rocket/satellite and switch seamlessly between multiple sats/rockets. It took a lot of time to get right but works very well.
Finally, several minor things were done and lot of bug fixing, which definitely improve the user experience.
So, what’s next for March? I plan to continue on improving the user experience, finalize the rework of some systems, integrate a full tutorial and adding more sounds/musics. Hopefully, a version will be available for testers by mid-March. There might be a public demo around end of March or April but it still depends on a lot of things.
Thanks a lot for following the project, if you have any questions don’t hesitate!