Hey everyone!

Today I've actually got something interesting to show you, so everyone who kept with us during my unproductive timeperiod give yourselves a pat on the back!

Nuclear Cannon Muzzle Blast
As some of you may have seen in Mark's journal, he's been drawing up a blast animation that shows when the Nuclear Cannon fires. It's pretty awesome (although the texture is huge), and it really adds a lot to the coolness factor of the cannon firing, but I digress, behold:



I like it[smile]

Statistics
Mark and I have come up with a cool system that keeps track of everything you've done in the game, and allows you to see a bunch of numbers telling you how awesome you are. The items we'll be keeping track of include:

-Money Spent
-Money you cost the enemy
-Enemy Aircraft Destroyed
-Enemy Tanks Destroyed
-Enemy Flak Destroyed
-Missiles shot out of the air
-Number of Missions played
-etc, etc

Personally, I think this will be pretty cool, because it gives people a way to see who is the best at the game, which adds replay value.

Medals
We're also planning on having medals that you earn for doing certain things, for example, killing 5 enemy aircraft in one mission earns you the Ace Medal. All this stuff is recorded as a statistic, so everyone can compare how good they are. It also adds a bit of a collection aspect to the game, and could even double as part of the Emblem element! Anyways, we were excited about that....

An Actual Game
Up until today, all you do in A22 is start the game, spawn, and blow stuff up until you either die, or quit, so today I set up a mission complete/failed system into the game so that now when you complete a certain criteria (defined in the level's scripting file), the mission will be completed, and after about 4 seconds of flying around with "MISSION COMPLETE" on the screen, the game ends (I don't have the menu system working yet, so I can't go to that yet). Because the scripting system allows you to mix and match triggers and reactions, you can set a bunch of elaborate criteria for Mission completion, or failure. For example, the script in my test level right now has these two events in it, see if you can figure out what they mean[grin]

-ALLENEMIESDEAD, MISSIONCOMPLETE;
-PLAYERDEAD, MISSIONFAILED;

Pretty simple eh? Of course these could be a bit more complex, as seen below:

-TIMERGREATERTHAN, 300, MISSIONCOMPLETE;
-ALLFRIENDLYBUILDINGSDEAD, MISSIONFAILED;

In that script, the game checks to see if the game has been running for over 300 seconds (5 minutes), and if so, the mission is complete. Alternatively, if all your buildings are destroyed, its mission failed. This type of script is quite handy for escort missions and "hold the fort" type stuff.


Well, Mark's been hard at work on the new HUD, so maybe we'll have a screen of that in action tomorrow, but for now I'm out of stuff, so I'll talk to you guys later!