Just an update.. I've made more progress in terms of Graphics.
The countryside level is now covered with destructable trees, which shatter in true "Tree been hit by plasma ball" fashion.

I've come up against my first real stumbling block.. There appears to be a serious bug in my particle system. The game has a single effect builder object which generates the particles, But after a while, after generating a load of particles, the whole game hangs... doesn't raise an exception or anything, just hangs. I've wrestled with this all weekend and it is something I really need to fix before I can make any more progress. I can't add exploding goats until it's fixed.

On the plus side, I was getting a little worried about performance, after adding loads of trees, the game was beginning to slow down a little.
But I ran it on a firends PC this weekend.. A beast of a machine AMD64 bit 1800mhz 2gig Ram etc.. (Details may be inaccurate.. I have consumed a lot of Vodka this weekend) But basically, it ran TOO FAST!! So I've got to limit the logic FPS. If this machine is anywhere near the Norm these days, then my performance worries should be less of an issue than I originally thought. So the benchmark will be my machine... which to be fair, doesn't even play Doom3 very well.

I'm going to add different level types.
At the moment I've got.
Mountain
City
Country

I'm going to add

Desert - Pyramids, sand dunes and Camels
Antartica - Ice, Snow and Penguins
Ocean - Oil Tankers and Cargo Ships.. the only place to land.
Moon - Low Gravity and Astronauts
Forest - Thick Forest, Massive Trees.


After watching a mate play it over the weekend, I might make a change to the control system too.. I'm thinking of adding it as an option rather than completely replacing it.

Thrust - Up
Fly Left - Left
Fly Right - Right
Aiming using the mouse - Abuse Style.
Firing using Space or Mouse 1
Shield using Enter or Mouse 2


I'm also going to add extra weapons.
Beam Weapon
Missile Weapon
Rapid Fire MINI Gun
Possibly EMP Weapon.


I've got to modify the AI too, the Computer opponent is far too reliant on Shields for protection and although it stops you from killing them immediately, eventually they run out of shields making them very easy to kill.