Today was a day filled with not especially fun, but very important code changes.

My partner re-factored the main menu system, to make it cleaner and more extensible, as well as to support the new gameflow.

I was able to get the player's progress saved and loaded properly. Before today, the player was simply generically instantiated from a template specified by the level designer. So each level had a different starting weapon, for instance, and you had no other items than your PDA / scanner.

Now, each time you exit a level, your player's inventory, all properties, and your scanned symbols are saved to the save file, via date / time stamp.

This way someone can quickly restart from the most recent game. We plan to add a summary to each entry to display how many symbols you've scanned and what weapons you have as well.

Now the game can work either way - if you specify a 'save point', it will load it over the level's default character, otherwise it will use the default char instead.

Yesterday I improved the symbol scanning effect and fixed some bugs with when it would invoke.

Today I added falling damage. Actually it's just impulse damage. Anytime your dude is hit with a large enough impulse ( only happens from falling right now ), he takes damage depending on the relative velocity change in the contact direction. Right now it's tuned so that a 25 foot fall kills a player with 150 health units.

Another feature I added today was a feedback manager. Previously, when you would do something like try to scan a symbol where there wasn't any, or pick up one too many weapons, you would tend to hold down the key for many frames, and the computer would kindly write something like 'you can't do that' to the console display and play a 'no' sound several dozen times in a row.

Now these sorts of messages are fed through a feedback mgr object that remembers the last few messages displayed, and how long ago they were used. If the same message comes up within a set time period ( right now a second ), it suppresses the message & the sound. The mgr can also be asked to force a message through, and to suppress all messages, which is useful when I use the EquipWeapon() code during level loading and you don't want a spurious weapon switch message & sound.

The plan is to get the alpha ready for testing this weekend.

Here is a recent shot at the end of the Sunken City of Vipon level. Note my low health due to falling, and getting pounded by too many lizard dudes....