I spent part of today adding new explosion effects to the game. Until now, all my particles have had random rotation. This makes them look natural, but for some explosion effects you want the particles to be ‘stretched’ and thus for them to be angled in the direction they face. Anyway, that’s in and looking good.
Also today I added some basic physics to debris so that when there is a big white explosive flash, it’s applied as a force to the debris which makes the explosion seem more 3D and impressive.
I’ve also been thinking about techniques to reduce the number of texture-swaps per frame, which is currently scarily high in some cases. I can’t easily use z-buffers for the game because the huge amount of alpha-blending that I do. (I tried it, and its slower). One thing I’m considering is more use of (manually assembled) texture atlases, another is to make greater use of concurrency by scheduling some tasks for processing by the CPU while the GPU is busy swapping textures.
I havent implemented resolution changing yet, but I’ll be taking everyone’s suggestions for doing so on-board on monday when I do it. I suspect I’ll display all options above a certain minimum height.