Its time for another Angels 22 update, so read on and see what we've been up to this past week.....
Democracy Fails... again
Mark did again folks, in yet another case of Mark's will overriding that of the majority of our journal viewers, he has changed the laser's color to green. While everyone did have a point that red is a commie color, and it is fitting given the nature of the game, nothing could stand up to the awesome looks of a green laser beam.... at night. Yep thats right, we fired up the game with the green laser and set the time of day to night, and it was awesome. The contrast that the lasers make with the dark sky is simply awesome, and so we changed the color of the emitter to green, and we're sticking to it, I think you guys will agree when you play the game[wink] Anyways, here's a screeny of the new green lasers in action (it looks much more kickass in motion however...)
Water!!!
Via the miracle of photoshop gradients, we now have semi-pretty water in the game. It's still not perfect (or perhaps it's too perfect...), I think we need to add some random waves and sparkles before it looks truly good, but this will do for now, and you can see in the picturesque screeny of our new level below...
Afterburner
Mark drew up an afterburner sprite today, so now whenever you boost your jet, you get visual feedback in the form of a huge flame out the back of your plane. I'm also thinking about adding some blurred streaks that fly across the screen when you start going really fast, but I'm not sure yet. Anyways, screeny time...
Low Level Boring Stuff
This section is dedicated to the stuff I worked on that doesn't result in a cool visual effect or gameplay feature, and today I'll be talking about the Load/Save order. When I initially started coding up the Dogfight engine, I didn't think that the order that things were loaded or saved would matter in the end, but as I've been adding more and more complex effects and gameplay tweaks into the game, this order has become very important. Many things in A22 function by manipulating variables that are always set to the same value at the beginning of every update loop. For example:
1. Every objects "isPainted" variable is set to False
2. When a radar is updated, all of its targets get their "isPainted" variables set to true
3. Any SAM site that sees a painted target can fire at that target
As you can see by that sequence, if the SAM Site was updated before the radar, then the radar will have not painted all its targets, and the SAM Site couldn't fire its missiles. This problem spurred me to add a new variable to the Thing baseclass that all objects are derived from, "loadpriority", which helps the game save/laod the objects in a level in the right order to avoid such unfortunate happenings. And thats all for this installment of "Low Level Boring Stuff".
Well thats all for now, check in next update for more... stuff.... Peace Out!
About the afterburner, I think it should introduce a bit of blur. Not motion blur, but, well, simply blur, maybe with less (or no) blur along the aircraft plane (take the "height" of the aircraft as the plane height, and tilt the plane with the angle of the aircraft).
Also, the aircraft should become a bit less controllable.
Final question (for now), any chance of a new demo? The current demo is loosing it's replayability, even after modding the level (by adding sam sites and lowering the player health) is loosing appeal, since the level is more or less static.
The screenshots aren't helping either. :P
And a bug report, I changed the player health to a 1000, and the GUI didn't properly handle it (at least not in the demo).