Updates and Upgrades

Got some pretty insane progress done this week, especially today evening. Over the last few days I've been constantly adding new maps and refining old ones, adding a whole bunch of new gameplay features and mechanics. But the more features I got done the more annoying the terrible place holder code from the first couple of days became. It took longer and longer to fiddle in new systems so I finally sat down today and rewrote most of the old broken ugly code and replaced it with new, even more broken, but slightly less ugly code! Yeaaay me! I'll need a couple more days to iron out all of the old and new little kinks in the systems, but then the overall gameplay should be fairly stable. I finally starting putting in some proper trigger and event based map design system which will hopefully make a lot more dynamic maps possible in the near future. I also pretty much rewrote the gun code from scratch. The new code is about half as long, twice as fast, way less buggy and super easy to mod. Now thats what I call improvement. Booya!

One feature I haven't really touched yet, and I probably won't until prototype version 0.1 is enemy AI. Currently the AI, (or the behaviour code to be more percice, as the therm AI is about as meaningful as calling a toaster high end hardware) is as basic as it gets: If they see you, they shoot. AI is not going to be a big part of the project anyway since I much prefer having dozens if not hundreds of enemies in a map instead of only a couple of smart asses. Though a basic movement system at the very least, inspired by the behaviour mechanics from Doom or Quake would be nice. It's not that these systems should be all that difficult to code, but it will probably require a whole lot of testing to see how much the frame rate suffers from constant AI check raycasting.

Still don't have any pictures or videos yet, but once I got a stable version, I'll take some time to document the whole thing and make some neat gameplay videos and screenshots.

Until then...