On my never ending quest of improving D2X-XL I turned my attention to earth shaker bomblets and their flight path and target locking behaviour. Don't ask me why, maybe because I had just built those nice new bomblet models and also had something like Descent 3's Cyclone missiles and their fabulous way to fragment into independent satellites on my mind for quite a while already. I just wondered why earth shakers didn't look and behave like these - so I set out to adding this sorely lacking feature to D2X-XL. Should be a breeze to do, I thought, I know the routine handling missile turning well enough.

Well, it turned out I didn't. After a while of fiddling around with it, I noticed that missiles still turned when I disabled it completely, and it dawned on me that I had been tackling the wrong code when it had come to making homing missile turn radii frame rate independent either.

The good of this is that I now not only have really nice earth shaker bomblet flight paths, but even managed to finally and once and for all fix homing missile turning behaviour. Yay!

The following video shows earth shaker bomblet flight paths at different missile turn rate settings. The new code makes the shaker bomblets home in more aggressively and find targets at longer range. To compensate a little for that, they will turn slower during their first three seconds of flight. This is of course an optional feature and under full control of the game host in multiplayer games.

Ain't they cute? As if that wasn't already more goodness than you could shake an ... errm ... bomblet at, here's some pictures of the new bomblets: