The sundial controls make a return

Due to the recent changes to the HUD in the form of the turret direction markers, we will be experimenting with the old sundial method of turret control. This method used preset rotations instead of the math based format they use now. By doing this, we can reduce the amount of overhead as well as make it more user friendly for people who had complaints with the monitor type ironclads.

The whole reason why the old method caused so much lag was the fact that each blue direction button had to talk to each other in order to light up the current direction button as green. That was the only to identify what direction the turret was facing, other than moving your camera around the ship. However we now have a small marker that rotates to point what direction the turret is facing so now all those blue sundial buttons don't have to communicate with each other.

We will do some field tests to be sure that this method is more responsive and then integrate it into the current update.

Update on the Update

Well RL is becoming quite the obstacle but we are making good progress. Most of the sound and particle effects are already in place, although some aspects were cut out because they were not very relevant or too over the top. Some other nice changes are being made such as making the damage indicators on the HUD easier to see. All the HUDs now show exactly where the guns are pointing, both for casemated ships and monitor type ships so that will be nice for some of the folks who had complaints about that. We are also thinking about making the HUD full perms so they can tweak it however they like.

We changed all the double guns turrets to use one sculpt prim instead of two regular prims so that will free up some prims, especially for ships like the USS Roanoke. There was also a bug in some of the ships which prevented them from reloading if they expended all their ammo which is now fixed.

Won't be long now, maybe another week or two. Then we can work on those Wrath Exile ships.