Hey everyone!

I've got a pretty cool entry for you guys today, I had a lot of time to work on A22 today, and in the process, I obtained some cool screens.

Smoke Trails
Today I realized that I never coded a way for objects to trail just smoke, they could only have fire emitters attached to them, and burn. So today I sat down and wrote a simple smoke emitter system, but all was not well, it took a good 30 minutes to fine tune all the parameters, so that it looked relatively good. During those 30 minutes, I took screens of some of the smoke trails I was producing, as you can see below (in handy thumbnails!)

This screen shows how think (and shitty) it looked at first


I finally got it to look a little thinner, but it still remained shitty


Too small perhaps?


Thats about right, but what's that it's coming from? Read on....


Guided Missiles
Thats right folks, in Angels 22 you get guided missiles. These aren't the shitty player controlled ones from Angels 20, these are full fledged smart weapons, capable of tracking and engaging the target you assign to them all on their own. Anyways, I was going to have a video of the missiles tracking and destroying a target(ie. a rock), but I've been having trouble with FRAPS lately, so that will have to wait until later, but rest assured, it's pretty cool.

Radar (ie. HUD)
This is a pretty cool addition, it's a small "radar" at the top-right of the screen, which shows the terrain below you, and the location of objects near you. In the screen below, you can see the 4 flak sites are shown as red dots, while the buildings(off-screen) are shown as gray blocks.



Apoch Piq's suggestion...
... is looking more and more attractive. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, a couple posts ago, Apoch suggested a way to get rid of the crappy seams all over the terrain in A22. Well, I was convinved that I could solve it by using a better texture, but better textures are apparently hard to make, meaning we need an alternative, which Apoch provided a few posts ago. Anyways, instead of using just one slab texture over and over again, random ones are chosen from about 4 different slab's when the level is loaded. This technique still allows us to switch from texture to texture mid-map (which I implemented today), but also makes seams alot easier to hide. Unfortunately, I don't have a new texture to test out the new system, but Mark's on it, and hopefully he'll have it by tomorrow, so I can show you guys a screen of not-crappy terrain!

Well, thats all for now, let us know what you think, Peace Out!!