Well school has started back up, and it would appear as I have little to no free time. Any free time I can get, I'll put into Charge development, though. So hopefully during Winter Break, I can get it all finished and polished up.
Well I promise I didn't die =D. Anyways, I've been doing a lot. But I finally got something done, it probably seems small to everyone else, but it's a huge accomplishment for me. I fixed the glitch that haunted me for so long. But now I've actually taken a huge step backward... I recoded the entire game. But the code is now much better. As I was looking at an earlier back up I had, the code was the result of big design flaws. So I got a much better design now, and I'm ready to really start cranking it out on this project.
Well, I've been going mad over this bug, I've even rewrote every relevant piece of code, and it just doesn't look like it's going to get fixed. I've decided to take a short break from that, and explore some other things. So I started today and I looked at LazyFoo's tutorials for Creating a Level Editor and Tile Engines. I made my own little demo, and it's pretty sweet =p.
Video Link!
Well today I spent all of my coding time trying to figure out this nasty bug/glitch. Nothing seems to click with it, I've tested it hundreds of times, I've gone through relevant and irrelevant pieces of code and I just can't seem to find it. Well I'm done for today but maybe someone else can help out while I sleep =D.
So I posted a video which you can see above that show's the glitch, and I've posted all the relevant code in here:
http://palib.pastebin.com/m5314b872
So if you find anything that may help, contact me at xianforce@gmail.com please =/.
Thanks for any support =D.
Well I lied in my last post =p. I said that I was going to work on a different type of bullet next, but as I thought about it, all my bullet ideas really revolve around effects, I think effects should be one of the last things, so I decided to finish all the enemies and get the game play working correctly, then go through and add in all the effects I want and create more levels.
So now I've gotten the next enemy: Revenant.
As of now, Revenants are represented by purple triangles, and in this little test there are a total of 5 enemies: 1 Grunt, 2 Drones, and 2 Revenants.
The Revenants are meant to have the best/most complete AI. I think how I have set them is good for a first level, but I'm planning on giving speed increases, and maybe some 'team AI' in later levels.
Another thing that got done was collision changes. As I was thinking about different bullet types I wanted to implement, it became quickly apparent that circular collisions weren't going to cut it. I needed different widths and heights in some scenarios so I've reverted back to bounding box collisions.
Neither of these things caused any problems at all, the only errors I got were from simple things like forgetting a semi-colon, or forgetting to include a header.
Well that's all that's been done today, I'm still making out some plans for how I'm going to implement Protectors. I'm thinking I'm going to have to implement Protectors and Motherships at the same time to see if they work correctly.
But I've also thought up of a better (in my opinion) game play. Instead of having Mother Ships, I could make some machine. This machine would have a timer on it and would create new ships every so often. As the levels progress, more and more machines are there. Whatever enemy comes out would be either completely random or maybe some kind of order. Protectors would do whatever they could to protect the machines. Like if a player shot a bullet and it was headed towards the machine, the protector would take the bullet.
Well those are my ideas for now, I'm leaning towards the second, because I think it would provide more interesting game play, and that way levels could either be really quick, or really long.
Well, hope to make another post tomorrow, ciao!