Recently I've been getting the gameplay taken care of...the gangsters can now move intelligently throughout the environment, and the player can order them around. If the gangsters see an enemy they will engage them for a certain amount of time depending on the situation, while still making their way to their goal.

The enemy boss AI is very basic at this point...there isn't much "strategery" in the game yet, the enemy gangs just throw all their guys at you ;-)

I've added a message system to the game, the player will get updates from the game through this system. Little envelopes queue up in the corner of the screen. There can be different priority messages, urgent ones will show up blinking and red. Alerts about your gang members being attacked, or enemy gangsters entering your territory, etc.

I'm still in the process of integrating Newton into the game to take care of the physics. I've got it applied to objects, and characters, but not vehicles. I'm going to get the vehicles taken care of in the next week, as well as put ragdoll physics on the characters :-)

I've been toying with the idea of making videos of the game for sometime now. I'm finding it difficult to record 25 frame per second of 800x600 video in real time (or even 640x480), while keeping the game at a decent framerate. A few solutions are to drop down the quality of the video, or to record at a lower framerate...either way it's hard to get smooth framerates ingame while recording a video...I'm going to keep trying/looking into it though.

I'll post links to 2 3:00ish long videos of game footage, this is the best I could do so far in terms of keeping the framerates high while recording. If you got the bandwidth to spare (I think they're like 33MB each) I'd appreciate some input on these. You could think of them as animated slide-shows ;-)

By the way...this footage is pretty raw, I guess I coulda taken some time to edit it, the first like 20 seconds are of windows explorer :-0

The videos are of different game sessions, the first is recorded at 640x480, the second at 800x600 so you can see the difference in quality.

In-game Test Video 1

In-game Test Video 2

And here's another screenshot to check out...The big part shows the Fog of War system...nothing outsite your territory is visible unless you have a gangster in the area. The little picture shows some gangstas walking in-step ;-)