Bang bang bang

I've been working on the code for weapons over the past couple of days. I've got the machine gun looking very nice now. The guns smoke, bullets stream at high speed, and there are sparks and more smoke when a bullet hits something. I've also got the code for damaging other vehicles based upon where they were hit. I even have bullet holes appearing on the cars (and blood on the pedestrians which Jen thinks is a bit gory) in the location where they were hit.

I'll take some more screen shots to post soon.

Nova Dawn in my pocket

The reason I've not posted for a while is that I got a bit stuck at the point of testing Nova Dawn on an actual Pocket PC. For the sake of convenience I've been doing all my development work on a desktop PC and hadn't created a PPC version. One of the reasons behind this was that I'm using STL and I knew it was going to be quite a tricky task getting STLPort working.

I bit the bullet one night a few weeks ago and got the whole thing compiling up using STLPort in the embedded compiler. Thats when I realised the memory footprint the game had. My tiles were too big and I had too many of them. Over the past few weeks I've had a couple of iterations of refining, resizing and optimising and finally last night I produced a vastly slimmed down version of the game that runs comfortably on my pocket pc. The game even looks just as good as the bloated version.

I'm now looking forward to coding the guns and vehicle damage. Other bits on the to do list are a random name generator for bases, which will be fun, and a rewrite of the random map generator.

Whilst play testing the gameplay side of things with bits of card, I've actually created quite a fun board game. I've been spending more time working on that recently than the computer game. I might include it in the final game distribution as a PDF file users can print out and play.