I'm finally back to making progress and, more importantly, not hating it! Unsolicited life pro-tip: allow yourself to take breaks. Sometimes you have to slow down in order to speed up (that's an orbital mechanics joke).
Scaling Back on Interior Customization
I've refactored the interior design system for color customization only. The model swapping system had some bugs to work out, and complicated the UI; these are both fixable issues, but I just kind of want to move on. I'm trying to get better at recognizing non-critical work that can be saved for future me, and I think this qualifies.
I also reworked the interior design UI a bit while I was at it. It's still ugly and I'd like to give it another pass before release, but it's good enough for now if I don't get around to messing with it again.
SPACE TRUCK
While the current Chonky Boi ship is certainly an improvement over the previous design, I'm still not super happy with it. Since I've decided to mostly hold off on the exterior customization system, I wanted to rework the model a bit for the next update. I made a bunch of little changes, then unexpectedly spent way too much time making this campy new cockpit, obviously inspired by classic American semi trucks:
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| 10-4, good buddy |
A bit too on-the-nose, perhaps, and I think it comes off as more goofy than cool, but I actually had fun making it. I feel like my modeling skillz are slowly improving; or, at least, I'm becoming more patient with the process. Anyway, "more goofy than cool" kind of sums up my whole vibe, so I'm sticking with it for now.
Exterior Customization
Work on customizable exterior colors is coming along quickly. I was able to reuse a lot of the work I did for the interior, both in terms of the UI and the actual functionality. It's clearly not quite finished yet, but here's a quick video to show where it's at:
So the code is written and the UI is in place, I just need a little more time to finish hooking them together and to get it all working with the save system. I should be able to wrap this customization nonsense up early next week.
Coming Up Next
With the ship customization boondoggle out of the way, I'll be moving on to input system refinements. I don't think this should take more than a week or so, but I haven't even looked at that code in like 3 years, so ... who knows. After that it's on to another round of graphical improvements; I have a ton of things that I want to do, but I'll be paring the list down to just a few things that I can finish in a reasonable amount of time. What are those things? I don't know! Tune in next month and we'll find out together.
