14 Nov 2007 : Project Blackhole version 8
Finally you can blow things up! Pythagoras' theorum is used to calculate the distance to any ship that is under the crosshair. If the ship is in range the laser will glow orange (in the left pane) and automatically locks to the centre of the target ship. After a few hits the target will explode, the explosion is done with png's which will be replaced with vectors at some point. The destroyed ship is removed from the render queue and never seen again.
18 Jan 2007 : Project Blackhole : Camera tests
The camera tutorial at Ahab's Math Tutorials formed the basis for this experiment. After rewriting the code into AS2 classes I worked on speeding up the calculations and most notably the way depth sorting was handled on the cube.
08 Jan 2007 : Ship viewer
This code was adapted from an excellent article at Macromedia explaining how to rotate a 3D object using Quaternions. Whilst being too complex to fully grasp the key thing about quaternions is they can be multiplied together to create a composite quaternion and supposedly require fewer calculations than with matricies. Apparently the camera positions in early Tomb Raider games are calculated using them.
I modified the code to add in my Cobra model (no easy task) and whilst I could rotate it using quaternions, I couldn't find a way to translate (move) it. There seems to be a bit of a debate as to whether quaternions are more efficient than matrix maths (Papervision didnt initially support them), however with matricies I'm on slightly firmer ground so I decided I would use matrix rotations from now on.
