A blog post talking about the past few days of work should be up here sooner or later, unless I pass out at the keyboard again.

Since my last update, I've:

• Changed the controls from buttons to StaticImages which are mostly transparent (looks great!)
• Revamped the progression system so that it moves by events now, which have the option of delaying the progression if they need to take a while (such as more elaborate Fire events might in the future or Move events.)
• Finished collision detection just far enough to notice that there is a much much better way to be doing that I will try to implement on Sunday or Monday. Right now I loop through and check all entities against the moving entity and if their spheres overlap I give the obstacles a push so they drift around the side. Kudos if you can name the immediate problems with this. One: Hackish. Two: Since drifting back to their original position is also treated as a sort of Move event, the obstacle and moving ship will push each other around until one drifts over to the side and they snap into place. The improvement I'm looking at is using Ogre's intersection queries so ee if any bounding boxes are overlapping and then do a check against their bounding spheres. I have also found a way to set certain flags on objects so I can exclude all objects moved by actual Move events and give them the priority when it comes down to moving obstacles out of the way. Other than that though, the function to bounce the obstacle back will be the same and translate it back so the spheres are not overlapping anymore.
• I've also done a little preliminary work on loading other battlexml files, but this one is puzzling me and may require more of a rewrite than I'm comfortable with. Unless of course I ask in the command line, but who would want that?

Today I've been working on revamping the laser system so it works smoothly with the round progression ( I never noticed that if you go forward to a fire event and then back up, the laser will still be there... d'oh! ) As an added bonus, ALL of the lasers in one round are shown!

The next few things I'm going to be getting done before bashing my head against the collision problem include icons for the control buttons, choosing a BattleXML file to load, and possibly getting ship textures fixed/replacing ships!

Today I was able to make it so that Entities will float back to their intended position if pulled away (or hopefully in the future, pushed away by a collision.) However, working out collisions is turning out to be much more finicky than I thought. I can find out if one Bounding Sphere intersects another, but not by how much. The formula (radius_one+radius_two)-distance should give me the overlap, but instead it keeps giving me a constant! I'll tackle this in the morning and hopefully have a lot more cool things to show tomorrow, like a video!

Today I squashed a few bugs related to round progression and added in one of the more exciting features to be seen in the viewer. You can now skip around battles with the VCR-ish controls at the bottom (hooray!)

Tomorrow I need to get that laser fixed though, it's pesky and always manages to ruin the mood.