Space flight from planet to station
Ship docking test
Ship boarding

Portals are very powerful due to some new possibilities

• Visibility culling: Connection of indoor and outdoor scenes, room to room connections. Visibility control (e.g. door opening/closing, LOD)
• Interactive content paging: That means no annoying loading zones are needed. Portals can serve as hint to load required content on the fly.
• Coordinate switching and axis reorientation: Makes things possible like gravity direction redefinition, wrapped or infinite geometry.
• Stencil culling through shapes makes effects possible like wormholes.

I’ve recently managed to import BSP scenes successfully. Which will be used for some of the indoor walking. For example the player would be able to walk inside ships or space stations. Currently I’m trying it with a combination of occlusion portals and BSP maps.

The image above shows an example how a corridor inside a spaceship could look like.

Info: The mapping I’ve done myself. The textures were borrowed from an old Quake games editor (I think called Quole). The lamp textures are from Halflife 1. As usual, I’m gonna replace this borrowed content later.

Planetoids are existing in our solar system inside the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Also there are different moons orbiting our gas giants and Mars. These moons are often shaped irregularly.

Simerge is decided to be a Mod for X3 reunion and I-War 2. This means it will be freeware and it will depend from these applications to run. The installation won’t contain foreign game resources. Hence Simerge will require both games to be preinstalled.

To keep the X3 reunion feeling in Simerge I decided to import controls skins from this game. Like X3 too, the player will be able to manage his ships, give them orders or group them together into sqadrons or whole fleets.
X3 Reunion is indeed a great game, but I’m a little bit disappointed with the unflexible GUI design. I thought of making own improvements in Simerge. Unlike X3, the GUI in Simerge should allow the player to select multiple ships at once and give them orders with only a few clicks. New features will be/are added like context menus and a multifunctional side applet like the one in Comand&Conquer games.
I also though of something like a collection or clipboard where the player can store his units for later usage. He can recall these ships at any time. It gets useful if ships are spread around all corners in space and they can’t be selected at once. In X3 it can get problematic if the player wants to do maintenance stuff on his fleet like repairing or equipment changing or if he wants to send a bunch of new fighters to carrier ships or replace older ones.

One day, I’ve been contacted by a writer. He told me that he wants to start writing for an upcoming online magazine dedicated to space software. Being a fan he wants to make his magazine available for free. My first intention was quite neutral. I must admit, I was neither surprised nor interested.
Some days later he sent me a small snippet of his work and then I realized that he is going to create something very interesting. It’s not only the content of the magazine pages. He uses also an own kind of design which attracts the reader to read more.

I think his magazine project deserves attention.
If someone wants to take a look on this, please follow the link http://multiverseweb.com/