Hey everyone! I am back again with cool stuff to share before next major update kicks off!
Ship and Camera Movement Overhaul
I've been tinkering with the ship's movement lately and finally got it to a point I'm happy with. The old setup felt like flying a sprite glued to the center of camera, and the movement was too stiff to feel like it was actually in space. so I reworked both the ship's movement and the camera follow.
The ship is now a free floating physics object. I ripped out the old manual drag calculation. Input is applied along the ship's local axes and tapers off as it reaches max speed. Every input now applies force, and the ship maintains momentum, rather than the previous "hold-to-move and release-to-stop" mechanic.
Bullets give the ship knockback based on their mass and speed while impacts shove the target at the contact point. Additionally, Collisions deal damage based on velocity, that is when the ship hits an object at high speed, both the ship and the object take damage.
On the camera side, I kept the old fixed position follow and added two offsets: one pulls the view ahead along the ship's velocity and the other drifts toward the mouse or gamepad look input. Together they give a lot more sense of speed and make the whole thing feel less reactive.
Nebula Star Streaking
The nebula shader has 3 tileable nebula layers and 6 star layers for depth, but the stars were plain dots. Stretching the UVs thinned them out, and re-sampling stars along a motion trail was too expensive, plus the dots visibly separated at speed and broke the effect. I switched to procedural generation with motion-aligned streaks, so stars stretch in the direction of travel without losing density or falling apart, and the shader stays cheap.
Still messing with the weights and the camera pull, and next I want to refine the damage model and add more visual feedback on impacts.
Thanks for reading, hope you all have a great day! :D