General Progress Update

This is just a general update, alas without any particularly exciting images.  I should have some updated screenshots soon, though. 

Control/AI Improvement

After spending a few hours remembering how to do control theory and Laplace Transforms, I did some significant upgrades to the Proportional + Differential controllers that are used to determine the rotational behaviour of the player and enemy ships. The parameters for the controllers are now calculated appropriately for each ship, thus leading to much better behaviour when rotating to the current target direction (less overshoot and faster damping).

I've also started to do a bit of preliminary work on the swarm mechanics.  One of the main issues here is how to efficiently identify the neighbouring Scourge ships when you could have around 2000 in play simultaneously (leading to around 2000000 naive distance calculations to calculate all neighbours).  I'm currently considering some kind of dynamic histogram-based binning method.

GUI work

I've also been doing a lot of work on some of the required (and slightly non-exciting) GUI aspects of the game.  The most important in-game GUI is the Ship Editor, where you can upgrade existing ship components and add new ones that you've scavenged.  This allows your ship to grow and improve over the course of the game (which is the main RPG aspect) as you add better shields/power generators/weapons etc.   Over the entire game, you will progress from being terrified of facing a single Scourge ship to being able to fend off a swarm of hundreds or thousands.