Play the Angels 22 Demo!!
Its been a while, I hit one of those development ruts where I just couldn't make myself want to work on Angels 22, but lately I've been picking it up again, so hopefully I'm all done with my down period.
AI Revamp
As a few of you may remember from (quite) a few entries ago, AI for the NPC planes in A22 has been "implemented" for quite some time now. Well, unfortunately, the old implementation.... well, it sucked. You see, the development of Angels 22 has been plagued with lofty goals being tacked onto an old engine that wasn't initially built for the stuff we're doing with it. The AI system is no exception, what was originally meant to be a simple search and destroy system has evolved into this huge wingman system that is supposed to be able to dogfight the player and to use advanced features such as the thrust vectoring and boosting. Unfortunately, the current "switch/case" implementation didn't lend itself well to adding complex states and behaviors, so I threw it out and started from scratch, using a class based finite state machine instead of the spaghetti code FSM. Hopefully this refactoring will make tweaking AI behavior a bit more user friendly and we can have some good old fashioned dogfights going on soon enough.
Giant Rocket
This is just a cool thing we have in the game for some reason. I'm still not sure why the New Soviet Republic built a new version of a failed Soviet moon rocket (N-1), but it looks freaking cool, and I'm sure Mark will mold the story to fit in the rocket, so its all good. Check out the scale on this thing in game:
And once it gets out of the atmosphere, the stages begin separating....
Stats Page
This is a neat little feature that I think adds alot to the game. The game just records a bunch of statistics for you to look at. You can also earn "medals" for performing specific acts, such as disabling 5 ships, which will give you a pirate medal. Anyways, here's the temporary screen I created with my stats for your pleasure. And don't worry, we still have more stats to add.
EDIT: I almost forgot, night-time looks much cooler now that we have stars, I can't believe I didn't think of that one sooner.....
I'm sure there's more stuff, but its crazy late, so it's going to have to wait until next time. Remember, if you haven't already, try out the Angels 22 demo and let us know what you think. Peace Out!
