Hey everyone!

Looks like its time for a long belated, and screeny full update for you guys, so read on, and be amazed at how little I've accomplished since my last update...

Radar
This was a little idea that Mark came up with, and as a bonus, it solved a programming problem for me! How they work is that the radar searches for a target, and once it has a lock, that target is flagged as being "painted" (which lights up the RWR on your HUD). Once a target is painted, any SAM sites that can see the "painted" target can fire upon it. This introduces an interesting gameplay dynamic, because if there are 15 SAM Sites guarding an objective, and you take out the only Radar, those sites are effectively rendered useless. Anyways, here's a picture of one of Mark's radar installations, and yes, the dish swivels[grin]


Armed Vehicles
This was a little feature that I put on the back burner for quite awhile, but I finally came back to it yesterday, and now everything works fine and dandy. What's nice about the modular weapons system I coded up is that any defined weapon can be placed on an object, so getting the vehicles to have weapons wasn't the hard part. The hard part that had me pulling my hair out last night was getting the weapons to be placed right on the vehicle when the vehicle was tilted(ie. going up a hill). This is no problem when all the weapons are located at (0,0) on the vehicles, but when a truck has a gun placed in its bed, the rotation becomes a bitch. Anyways, I finally fixed my problem using some hardcore vector math, and now the vehicles work great, as you can see in this action packed screeny below:


Symbolic Lasers
This was one of Mark's more brilliant ideas. Apparently, while brainstorming on what the Laser Flak should look like, he decided to look up what a Russian tower looked like, so he could model the flak after it, and after a quick search, decided that the Laser flak needed to look like the towers at the Kremlin, and in order to fire the laser, the bulb on top of the tower peels open, and a laser emitter slides into place. It sounds really wierd, but it adds a nice symbolic "Command and Conquer"-esque awesomeness to the Lasers, and the peeling animation looks kickass too[grin]. Below you can see two screenshots showing the Kremlin laser in it's closed, and opened states...

Closed


Opened


New Flak Types
Another thing Mark recently finished was nearly the entire AAA texture set, which allowed me to put in the Flak definitions, and get all the AAA in the game. As you can see below, there are plenty of types that you haven't seen or played against yet, and we're keeping some underwraps, so there are still a couple more to be added...



Intro Scene
I came up with the idea for the A22 intro scene while sitting in school, and thinking of some way to have a cool intro sequence that used the games engine. Now usually, these types of things are Mark's territory, but remarkably, my idea was good, and now we're sticking with it. I'd tell you guys how it goes, but that would ruin the fun, so all you get is this screenshot of part of the sequence (with placeholder art and terrain):



Scripting
While planning the intro sequence, I realized I had lots of new definitions to add to our scripting language (which I still don't have a name for[wink]), so today I got to work on those. I added a bunch of cutscene specific triggers and reactions that I'm probably only going to use once in the intro scene, but I also coded up some useful stuff, such as the RANDOM trigger, which.... triggers itself at random[grin]. I hope this language turns out easy enough that someone can use it easily after we release A22, and we can get some fan-campaigns going!

Computer Trouble
One of the main reasons why I wasn't getting much work done on A22 was that my home compy started to slow down and crash quite a bit about 2 weeks ago. Dev C++ was crashing every 2 compiles, and Paint took a minute to load up, which was killing my work ethic. On Friday, I did some research, and downloaded some cleaning software, and discovered that I had about 4GB of Windows droppings sitting on my HD. After I got rid of all that shit, my computer kicked back to life, and I got to coding again. Moral: If your machine is slow, try to fix it before you work on your project, slow computers = reduced ability to work.

Command and Conquer: The First Decade
Last week, Mark and I both purchased copies of C&C:TFD, and I must say, it is the most awesomely nostalgic experience of my life. It harkened me back to days of old, getting up early to play the original C&C on my parents IBM Aptiva... ah the memories. I had heard earlier that the game had plenty of bugs, but I downloaded the latest patch, and I haven't had any problems (except for lost hours I can't account for...). In anycase, I would highly recommend this to fans of C&C, or for anyone who has never experienced the magic that is Command and Conquer. "Fight, Win, Prevail!!!!"

Well, thats it for now, I hope this entry makes up for my absence as of late, I'll try to post a bit more often now that I'm back in the productivity curve again. Peace Out!