The latest version of the game now supports player death. A short lived version caused the game to restart at level 1 after a player's death, but on John Allan's suggestion, the player now respawns on the same level amid a swarm of asteroids that may or may not have killed him in the first place.

Anyway, please try it out and send me your feed back.

Well, this is hardly a physics simulation but what we have now is collision mesh based detections and simple 2d inelastic collision response. Feel free to bounce off the asteroids as much as you want while you can. Nnext we'll be implementing a player death and restart. I've been kicking around a couple of cool ways to do this, but with the current physics system, I wouldn't expect more then a flashy explosion.

Getting ready for the level system we've implemented a cheat to skip between levels:

'-' To go back a level
'=' To advance a level

Currently the only special features of levels are the number of asteroids that spawn at the start.

Interested in helping out? We are in need of some part-time/volunteer 3d artists. The art content in this game is somewhat limited so there is not a lot of work to do. Currently we are looking at remodeling some existing Star Wars models that were made for film. Of course, we can't use these models forever, but until Lucas Arts sends their Storm troopers to wipe our hard-drives, we'll keep going with these.

If you're interested, contact me. You can use jobs@lefty2shoes.com if you can't reach me any other way.

Thanks,
--Marc

Big news. XSpace had its first success run on a Macbook earlier today. I can't take any credit for this. It was more of a surprise to me than anyone else mainly because I made no changes in the most recent build that would make a difference on Macs in particular. Just another mystery that makes working with Java such a pleasure.

The run was far from perfect. There were missing textures and scrolling the page that contained the applet cause very odd clipping of the GL window that prevented the minimap from displaying. All told, I'm very happy for the progress. It seems that this project has greatly reduced my standards for a quality application.

It looks like we might be taking another look into web starts after all.

--Marc