more game engine content

 I've got explosions and particles in my rpi4 game now, time to start working on engine plumes.. currently this is hand placed and can't move yet but thats this weekends work.. looking pretty though

a new toy

 Ive tried very hard to wean myself from buying boards that usually prove to be useless for game dev, but I was really looking forward to getting my hands on a Tinkerboard2. It has a 6 core CPU and a Mali 864, with OpenGLES3.2...if it has drivers...

The TB1 is a nice enough board, certainly it competes favourably with the RPi3, so was hoping the TB2 might compare with the Rpi4... it almost does....

Mesa drivers provide a working environment but it is a little behind on the GLMark2 scores and while it runs Empires well enough its not beating the Pi4 in FPS, staying at a fairly steady 30fps when the Pi4's manging 60. Actually a very steady 30fps, which is a but suss.

It needs a bit of fine tuning to get some of it performance up to spec but it is indeed a capable board. But its GPU isnt yet able to beat the Pi4, except with it comes to Anti Aliasing an image... for some reason its amazing at that... But aside from that, its running everything else at about half the speed of the Pi4... not bad... quite usable, and maybe there are some tricks to make that better, like there were on the Pi4. I may well do a lower res version for it.

But its a nice board, I like it, its going to be a useful double check target.

Probably a step too far

 Added a set of bridges to the project too

which... might be a step too far, but it may be cool to just observe an attack from their view point rather than try to control them.

Only issue is I can't locate any crew men/women to populate the bridge, I'd need a range of uniformed characters sitting and standing around doing, crew type things... and there' snothing around at any price I can see.

I did see the maximo ones which look great, but... very high poly counts on those, and I 'd have to write an fbx animator to use them...

Pretty cockpits

 Only a 1st pass, no lighting or effects on the texture, something to add later if it seems viable

Solar System procedurally generated

So every one if the 8192 star systems in the game is generated with its position info depending on the number of arms in the galaxy and so on, but once you focus in on a star system, you need to be sure its consistantly displayed the same way. So here you are. A solar system derived from a Seed value that each star is given on creation, allowing it to create a unique but consistant set up, of different planets, gassy, rocky, lava, dead, etc.. and a jungle/earth type planet located at the 3rd or 4th positon in the goldilocks zones...... I "could" make them revolve and orbit the sun and I "could" give them moons, but ....maybe later. Once again this is essentially an eyecandy effect that we can use in game or just as a game intro, but its nice to know the solar systems can be generated like this to allow the system to look the same if you come back to it. And thats enough eyecandy now, time to get some user interaction and gameplay mechanics to make use of all these nice render systems and models we have. Please follow and support my efforts to get this game out on Raspberry Pi4 for Spring 2021. www.Patreon.com/BrianBeuken

and using the stars in anger

 I now have the galaxy generator with stars in place in my game menu. Looks very cool when used in this, though I have added a bit more content to that menu since this video was made. Watch out for more.