Like I planned, the very basic gameplay is now in place. I added some things since the last past in order to reach this.

Planet

I added a planet to the middle of the playing field. Adjusting the physics was a walk in the park, I simply added the force due to gravity to the net force acting on the ships and it worked (however, this is another point where some fiddling with values is possible).

The planet is the first graphical object that’s loaded as a model and not created by the program at the moment. It’s simply a flat shaded sphere exported from Maya, but I think I messed something up with the export settings because it wouldn’t render correctly.

Collision Detection

Collision detection is currently handled by a singleton class of the same name which can check object pairs for collisions. Since I’m not using the correct geometry at the moment anyways, I kept the checks simple for the time being.

Next week

With the bare essential gameplay in place, I will try to enhance the game in the next week to produce a better iteration than this week. Until the next weekend, I want to have the toroidal space in place, and then I’ll spend the weekend making the whole thing nicer. Generally, I will do some refactoring, as some things are all over the place in the code at the moment.

Overall, I have to say that so far my impression of XNA is pretty good, it came with everything I needed so far, the import of a model seemed to work fairly well, and the debugging on my XBox also works nicely.