February 8 (All in the Timing)

The InstantAction contest deadline has been pushed back to February 18 which means another couple weeks to work on things. It could mean Access Denied will be included after all, provided I get back into the mapping mood. Regardless, the extra time is a welcome relief as it'll mean a much stabler build of the game to showoff while also giving me some time to work on release materials (i.e. a proper manual, website updates, etc.).

With that said, the past week has been a productive one. In my last update I mentioned wanting to work on some special effects, namely: motion trails for the hovertanks and a fixed function fullscreen glow effect. This is still a work-in-progress but the motion trails are in. Getting them working was a bit of a crash course in OpenGL but I think it was worth it. Originally my intent was to replace the particle contrail emitters with the motion trails but I opted to go for a combination of both. The particle emitters have been tweaked so they die off fairly quickly which makes them look like engine glow. Nifty effect that's difficult to catch in screenshots but here's my best effort:


















The fullscreen glow effect is proving to be less than cooperative. The idea behind it is simple: render the screen to a small texture, set the appropriate blending mode, then draw that texture (stretched) over the screen. The upscaling results in a blur effect that makes everything look as if it's glowing. Unfortunately, my OpenGL knowledge is somewhere between nonexistent and mediocre which makes actually implementing it troublesome. But, as they say, third time's a charm so I'll be giving it another try later on this week.

Despite my OpenGL woes, I'm happy to report that the shockwave effect issue that's been plaguing me for the past few weeks has been resolved. I ended up creating a custom Shockwave class that was heavily based off of the Splash class. The main difference between the two is that, unlike Splash, my Shockwave class is fully networked so it can instantiated on the server and then propogated to all clients within scope. The animation for the shockwave is only updated clientside so only the bare minimum amount of data is sent across the network.

With all of the coding fun going on, I managed to find some time to tweak a few GUI graphics. The maps now have an appropriate preview pic that's shown in the Select Map dialog, the StratChat HUD was updated to better support multiple resolutions and the powerup icon was reworked (again...). Speaking of which, the powerup icon is now on it's third revision and I'm sill not happy with it. 2D icons are just not my thing, apparently.

In other news, the website update is coming, as is the GGE page and a slew of other things that'll hopefully get the marketing effort rolling. Watch out for those!