Here's a first look at the user controlled vehicle (LGOV) at various locations on one of our asteroids.

At long last, an update.  Apologies for the radio silence, we've been neck deep in game guts.  Its funny, in many game site blogs that I periodically check, I see this same type of ‘sorry bout not updating you’ post, and now I'm doing it.  Much of this recent time has been spent with designs, and gameplay mechanics. We are just now transitioning into art production now that we have a pretty good handle on how this first iteration of Blackspace will be structured.

It seems like no matter what I work on in Blackspace, I can never quite step away from having fun with rigid body physics. Some might have already gathered from Jerry’s dev blog post (looking at the top-left window icons) that we are using XNA and various other frameworks at our disposal. I plan to get to that all in time, but the most important one of them all - not because of the API code size but because of how it will integrate into the core gameplay experience - is our physics system. So I figured it’d be good to briefly touch on how we’ve integrated BEPU into our framework, and before I do that, I want to point out that BEPU is simply great in just about every way. The demos are to the point and the forums are very active and helpful thanks to “Norbo” who answers just about any question posted on there.

Here’s a “stress test” shot of boxes scattered about on the planet using BEPU:

When we were working on prototype tech, right off the bat, we pretty much knew we wanted to use a 6-sided-normalized-cube mesh that would be utilized as a height map for physical interaction with a planet-like surface, . I’ve already seen a handful of other projects utilizing a similar scheme, though in most cases, they usually talk about rendering a planet surface, rather than the physical interaction aspect.