Excuse horrible placeholder graphics:



Time to unveil a bit more detail about the new project then. The backdrop and main sprite graphics in the above are purely placeholder.

Now that the basic physics is sorted after yesterday's post, it was time tonight to start on some of the cool stuff. The main character can now jump and swing around the level using his telescopic robot arm.

You move the player with A, D and W for jump. Whenever you hold down left mouse button, he fires his robot arm towards the cursor and if it hits a wall, it sticks. At this point, you can swing on the arm 360 degrees (well, not through walls, obviously). When you release left mouse, the arm zooms back to its start position at the centre of the player.

The arm is rigid, not a flexible rope. The main reason is that I don't really know how to implement rope physics, but it also gives the game a bit of originality so its staying.

Texturing the arm was a bit tricky - I've learned to my peril recently that repeating textures and linear filtering are hard to get to play nice together, so instead I load a long repeating arm sprite into my texture atlas, then calculate texture coordinates for the arm based on the length of the arm and the difference between the top and bottom V's of the texture coordinate rectangle that the atlas generates for the arm sprite.

Feels pretty nice and smooth to play and quite fun just swinging around the test level at the moment.

I want to move a bit further forward before I release the first demo, but I'll keep posting progress updates and if I update any of the graphics I'll bung up some more screenshots.

Thanks as always for reading and comments always welcomed.

if(Claw.Mode()==cmLocked)
    {
    Vector R=P-Claw.Position();

    if(fabs(R.Length()-Claw.Length())>0.1f)
        {
        Vector N=R.Normalised(); N*=Claw.Length(); 
			
        Vector U=Claw.Position()+N;
        Vector C=U-P;
			
        Shape.Pos=U;
        Vel+=C*16.0f;
        }
    }