I love SciFi and anything to do with space/physics/astronomy. I had some planet shaders kicking around that I made a few years ago for a TGEA demo, and was porting them over to T3D when I decided to see how tricky it would be to make a simple space shooter prototype with T3D.

Here's the result of 2 weeks effort. My dev machine isn't really up to scratch for this, so I couldn't capture good quality video, but hopefully this is good enough...

Features:

Starfield class
This is a procedural random starfield generator. Parameters control the color distribution, size distribution, and 'clustering' and of the stars. The stars are rendered as a combination of billboarded sprites and colored points. The billboarding is done with a custom shader. Missions can contain multiple starfields. The starfield is rendered after the skybox.

BackdropShape class
This is intended for shapes that are part of the background, shapes that are supposed to be far away and not interacted with. In this prototype, the planets and moon are backdrop shapes. In reality, the planets are only a few units in diameter, and are located a few units from the player. I created new render managers to handle the backdrop shapes, and this allowed me to render them after the sky and stars, but before the rest of the scene.

Planet shaders
The earth is rendered using a custom shader that implements a normal mapped surface, specular on the oceans and city lights on the dark side. The clouds are a separate normal mapped sphere slightly larger than the main planet. The atmosphere haze is a larger sphere rendered using a separate atmosphere shader.

Space dust
To give some feeling of speed when flying around, I used precipitation with zero velocity to represent dust particles that give a visual indication that you are moving.

Roids
I resurrected the fxShapeReplicator for this, as I wanted a way to generate asteroid fields procedurally, which the forest class isn't able to do. I fixed the phantom collision issue that the shape replicators suffer from, then modified it to allow me to place the shapes in an ellipsoidal, toroidal or cylindrical arrangement.

SpaceVehicle class
Based on the flying vehicle class with modified physics and controls to suit the space setting.

AISpaceVehicle class
Simple AI pilots that can fly to a destination, or follow and shoot at a target.

HUD
Based on the guiReticleHud resource. I added some extra stuff to display the approximate firing solution as a cross to give the player some guidance on where to aim. Also added an indicator to show the direction to the current target. The video doesn't show these too clearly :(

Ships and station
I borrowed some models from OOLITE to use as placeholders, notably Griff's ships as they were easy to convert and freely available.

Limitations
The big issue with developing a space game is always going to be floating point accuracy. T3D is really only able to support a playing area of +/- 5 to 10km in all directions before floating point precision errors begin to cause visual glitches and physics errors. There are ways around this, but none of them are trivial. I decided to ignore it, and keep the playing area small.


I think this shows that with a bit of work, T3D is more than capable of this kind of game. I'd like to take this further and add some kind of fast paced, team-based CTF gameplay with different ship classes and roles, but I doubt that I will ever find time for that.