On break for the holidays.  Have a good one

Ok I just made a new video I am playing with the AI, showing off the Mycon and Yehat ships.
The AI is pretty early at the moment, and is very jittery as you can see : P

Also the Sa-Matra makes an appearance and you can see the edge of the space background (a drawback of using a big bitmap for the bg, gonna have to make it tileable or something)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF4QqK4nNqQ

 Not much new this week because I have been tackling the next big obstacle..   AI!  I thought before finishing up the rest of the ships, it would be a good idea to at least know how the AI  works.  So I’ve been staring at the code for the last few days trying to figure it out.

So far its about as hard as I thought it would be but things are slowly making sense.  Right now I’m trying to get the AI’s “pursue” routine to work.  Did you know the SC2 ships have a “entice” mode?

Other than that I have the Yehat and Mycon ships weapons and specials working, making a total of three complete ships.  Theres still have a ton of ships to finish, I estimate it would take maybe 3-4 weeks of solid work do them all.

I’ve been procrastinating on making a new video, I should do it soon though.  Its just kindof annoying trying to capture a nice fight without AI or a second player.  I already have a video of a stationary ship getting blown up 

This week has been one of the most productive weeks EVAR.   Let me list off the new things implemented:

• Asteroids!
• All Victory Songs!   (before it would play only the Arilou ditty)
• Collisions on everything!
• Orz Howitzer Turret- even rotatable using the right stick!
• Supox Special Thrusters- first feature complete ship?  :O
• Randomized Planets-  in fact, I didn’t mean to have it in there but the Sa-Matra is in there too!
• A small energy counter fix!!!!

The highlights for me are the new tidier collisions, and the Orz Cannon. 

Now, the collision handler checks all the objects against eachother for collision, opposed to before where I was only checking ships against other ships, planets and projectiles.  So now asteroids will bump ships, bullets will hit planets, and planets will destroy asteroids.  Everything bumps everything

The reason why adding the Orz cannon is cool is because I figured out how I will be attaching objects to ships.  So adding the Chmmr Zap-Sats should be relatively simple now

Anyway, I was thinking of stuff I could do after the port is complete and I think melee missions would be a cool idea.  I mean one on one melee is fun, but to make people wanna play this on an XBOX360, its gonna need some more variety

The Toys for Bob site has had some remodelling done since I was last there, so you can check it out if you haven’t been there lately.  Looks like it was updated in June?  Somebody needs to post these things so people know.  : P

Toys for Bob!

This week there were a few days where I was messing around with my computer so I actually didn’t get a whole lot done this week.  I was adding some weapons, and fooled around with some other things (Orz rotating cannon, Syreen song (still WIP)).

However, I did implement joystick control (IE rotating towards the joystick direction)  early in the week.  I’m not 100% sure about the results-  It does work pretty good on fast ships, but for slow ships the traditional way feels the more natural way to steer.  So I guess being able to switch between them would be best.                           Â