I know you guys were expecting a substantial post update or something. This concept disturbs me somewhat, as I'm worried about becoming "lame" and "old". Often I awake in a cold sweat about falling off the journal page, and so I feel an unrelenting need to post, even when I don't have a lot of big news. This entry is a lot of very little news. Nanonews, if you will.

Like other of my favourite journalistas on GDNet, I'm going to separate this entry into several sections.

Propane UI
Is going rather well, though you can already see that I got distracted and ended up writing a functional "math print" routine. It takes a function pointer to a mathematical function (for example, sinf) and uses a very inefficient algorithm to print wavy or droopy text. It's rather useful, and kind of neat with tanf and piecewise functions. The slider controls the speed of oscillation, and I added another slider to the active release to control the amplitude.

I'm now looking into better ways to manage large collections of controls in propaneUI; we'll see what's up. I'm also concerned about the inefficient message passing.
Glow
I am starting to implement the Hunters, which are exceptionally strong military thugs with better-than-average accuracy and dexterity, albeit with a slow-firing weapon and a critical weakness to electricity. They explode into gibs on death.

Those of you who are large fans of Ravuya trivia will note that they look almost identical to the main character in a previous failed game, Sequence 13. This game was, er, my primary inspiration for Glow, and I swear it's been through about six or seven start-stop cycles before eventually becoming a zombie-killing black and white gorefest. I may or may not add some weird story elements that tie the two games together, and proceed to make the actual Sequence 13 game one day (which features a farther-future storyline than Glow's cyberpunky war-torn plotline, including nanotech, robotic surgery and bionic limbs). But that's a maybe in the future, and it's not at the top of my list of "games to make". What is at the top of my list is going to be pretty interesting, and I'll reveal that the day I release the final beta of Glow.

Speaking of the final beta, here's the plan: I'll release the final beta a week before "final release" in order to get major showstopping bugs stomped. This release will be for Windows and OSX (Universal). I'd really rather not release to all the big sites with a crash bug and then try to revoke their copies so I can replace them with updates, you see. That happened with Freezer 2 for OSX, and I think all 3000 people who downloaded it from C|NET are rather angry at me. Since they're Mac users, they're most likely making an airy documentary about it set to Bjork. I kid, I kid.

I'm also looking to bang out the final features list, and then implement the last of the game features, as well as some custom AI for the bosses. Then it's off to the races to implement the persistent game data configuration file (holds unlocked weapons/minigames, high scores, best times and survival records). After that, it's content, content, content and testing, testing, testing. Which is not fun.

I'm also considering punishing the user for dying when at a higher level. I'm thinking after about level 5, each death will take off 25% of your XP for this level because you should know better, dammit.

I'll post a screenshot when I get back home. I would've done it last night, but I had forgotten about the journalistas. I am vastly unpleased with myself. At least you can poke around in the history wiki for awhile.

I also got around to implementing some visible weapons (the bonesaw looks particularly awesome, as it has organic-looking hydraulic tubes coming out of it and is the size of a small house), as well as the Splinter XMP machine pistol (which fractures small "splinters" of lead off of a solid brick, and then fires them at subsonic speed).

I also patched up the interrupting rifle, which (if you've played Glow in the last couple releases) is a large, slow-firing rifle designed for destroying the engine blocks of tanks. It also gibs up enemies quite well.
Propane Injector
Glow has exposed lots of flaws in PI. I've thus drawn up several pages of block diagrams for the next-generation version of PI, which will make the interfaces more consistent, clean up duplicate code wherever possible, and provide some new classes for game management as opposed to data warehousing. It may also include SQLite.
Associated other crap
Uhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... my sodey is too cold. My teef hurt.