It's nice to finally have the time and means to get back into the Gamedev groove!
College
As many of you may remember, I was trying to go to the U.S. Air Force Academy for college, until I was temporarily medically disqualified for heartburn. Well, I'm now spending at least a year at New Mexico Tech and reapplying to the Academy this year, as I've been hella busy doing school work and whatnot, which is part of the reason I was out of the GDNet circuit for awhile there. Well, now I'm getting into the groove of things, so hopefully I'll be able to spend more time gamedev-ing and writing journal entries!
I'm really liking the whole college thing, being out on my own is kinda nice, and so far I've been doing alright for myself schoolwise. Unfortunately, the male/female ratio at my school is abysmally low, which really starts to hit you after the first month or two...
Dead Compy
Well, my homebuilt machine finally kicked the bucket a week or two into my first college semester, so I was computer-less for quite some time, which really sucked ass, and was definitely a contributing factor to my complete lack of coding for a couple months. Another downside of the loss of the computer was that I essentially lost access to all the code for FoT and A22, and until I get the motivation to pull out the hard drive and plug it into another computer to get the stuff I need off, I'm kinda out of luck. Luckily I was able to get a pretty pimpin' new lappy, which makes me happy!
Angels 2X
If any of you guys read Mark the Artist journal lately, you'd know that in light of recent events and revelations, we're changing up the game plan for the Angels XX series of experiments. We came to the conclusion that we just dont have the spare time or the resources to make a complete game, and still have it live up to the standards we want. So now instead of making a complete game, we're going to focus on making a 3 level "tech demo" that includes all the popular features from Angels 22, but without the ambitious attempt at making it all fit together with a complex storyline and 20+ levels. This doesn't mean that we're planning on making only three levels and then forgetting about the game, just that our initial goal is to make three well crafted levels to show off the good parts of the game concept. In fact, the plan is to implement a .WAD-esque package file that includes all the level information and whatnot, so we could essentially release "expansion packs" if the concept really takes off.
A nice side effect of my old computer dying is that I now have to start coding essentially from scratch, and that I wont be tempted to use dated and crappy modules from Angels 22 to speed things up.
The Agenda
My short term goals for the A2X project right now is to make a better terrain system. The old one was okay for most situations, but it had inherent flaws that made it hard to use for levels that didn't include gently rolling hills and no abrupt changes in elevation. I'm planning on starting to code a terrain prototype pretty soon here, so check back often and hopefully I'll have a few screenies for you guys.
Random
So my friend and I flew a Cessna 172 up to Albuquerque a few weekends ago to hang out with some friends of mine. After spending the night, we returned to where we parked the airplane the day before. Much to our surprise (and my delight), there was an F/A-18F Super Hornet parked next to our little Cessna, which was extremely badass, as the Super Hornet is one of my personal favorites, and I'd never seen one up close before. Anyways, here's a picture of the jet next to our little plane (you can see it's nose in the bottom right corner of the pic). I dunno, I just thought it was cool...
