New this week:

• New 4-p melee interface-  still have to make a nice 4p ship selection screen though
• Options menu- where you can toggle controller vibration, music and Rotation style
• Bug fixes as usual

I wanted to post a build this week, but new bugs are popping up after re-activating the new rotation style, and changing the rendering methods again.

Anyway heres the UI I’ve been working on, I think I managed to keep all the elements from the original intact:

A fairly big milestone has been hit- All ship abilities are complete!!!!!!!  Time to celebrate!  Woo! 

Things done this week:

• Slylandro lightning finished!
• Revamped laser code
• Finished up Orz Marines
• AI  Slylandro, Ilwrath
• AI can now detect when a laser will hit
• Bug fixes

I want to get the AI nailed down next, but while I do that I’ll also work on some mockup screens for the 4player mode.  Nowadays its fashionable to have the least amount of UI as possible, but I couldn’t bear doing something like removing the captain or even the ship portraits.  However adding another sidebar makes it feel cramped.  Hmm..

On the UQM forum there are some nice SC1 style portraits of SC2 ships posted by VileRancour.  The new ships fit in quite perfectly with the classic SC1 ship portraits!  Perhaps they will appear in a future build 

Heres a random idea I was pondering:  Counter-Strike style Melee!  Start off as default Precursor ship, and buy upgrades each round.  I’m guessing having the biggest gun would win most of the time.  There would have to be another objective besides killing.  I suppose some kind of capture the flag?

Again not much new this week, I forgot when writing last weeks update that I was going camping for a few days, so that is my excuse :)  However, although its not finished,  I did work on the Slylandro lightning.  It remains a little tricky because of my not so awesome laser code, but that will all be fixed eventually. 

No new progress to report this week, my time was spent working on my flash game project.

I wanted to catch up a little since its been taking longer than expected to finish.  My personal deadline on it is mid-July, so I’ll still probably be distracted from SC2 for a lil while, but not too long.  :)  I think this week I can at least get the Slylandro lightning implemented.

Pretty good week, I knocked alot of things off my todo list.  Much more than I was expecting to get done

• Fixed Kohr-Ah blades homing
• Fixed Supox special
• Melnorme Special
• Orz marines (mostly working)
• Drawing objects onto the ship portrait (Vux limpets)
• Slylandro Special & movement
• Race names above the ship portrait (needs tweaking)
• Fixed the lasers up a bit (probably still needs an eventual rewrite)

After all the ships are done, I still have some bugs to fix, but here is  what I plan to do immediately afterwards:

• 4 person Multiplayer!
• Xbox-LIVE networking!  (I am guessing this will be crazy hard to do)
• 16 player mode?

Exciting times ahead

Some cool news this week, the Dream Build Play has been announced and they’re giving out FREE 12-month XNA trials!

All you gotta do: Register for the Dream Build Play Contest, install XNA on your computer, grab XNA Game Studio Connect for your xbox, then you should be able to deploy.ccgame file to your xbox! Actually I’m assuming that’s how it would work, perhaps someone could verify? Thats how it works on a non-trial membership at least. Anyway, theres no xbox build ready yet, things are still buggy here.

New this week: Chmmr Zapsats & Tractor beam.

The number of ship features left to implement is getting really low:

• Melnorme Confuse ray
• Orz Intruders
• Slylandro (everything)
• Bug fixing on the lasers

I am thinking perhaps in 2-3 weeks all the ships should be about complete. Crazy!

PS: Play Roogoo!

New this week: Ur-Quan fighters & Ilwrath cloak

So thats about wraps it up for the classic SC1 ships. The fighters die when they run into a planet though- unlike the original where they make their way around it, so gotta fix that later.

I also added the ability to fill in sprites via pixel-shader instead of manually setting the color data in texture file. Its a more elegant solution, which makes it snap to do the Utwig shield and Ilwrath cloak.

In other news, I’ve been holding off for a long time but I finally bought a CC membership. So the game is now running smoothly on the XBOX360, and its pretty cool. I just tested it for the first time with two controllers, and it works! After all the ships are working, I want to see what four players is like

Wootz!

Time this week has been divided between this and another project I have started, a small flash game.

Things implemented this week: New style rotations, the Chenjesu DOGIs (not thoroughly tested) and minor bug fixes

NEW BUILD HERE: http://cid-e4f1227696c43a98.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/UQM_XNA_Melee.rar

Keep in mind only player #1 gets to spawn as a new rotation style ship, and all AIs still use the old 16 degrees. Also remember to toggle through views (when in Challenge mode) using the Y button(xbox controller), or Y key(keyboard).

I have almost all the original SC1 ships functioning, only the Ur-Quan fighters, and Ilwrath cloak remain. I did do some work on the Ur-Quan this week- right now you can send out fighters but they do not attack / return to ship.

In other news, the XNA Community Games beta is up, so people can now submit games but unfortunately only CC members in the US can download at the moment.

Frungy time!

Not much new this week, just made some progress on the AI.  I finally got them to act closer to normal, so now they dont just flee to the opposite end of the screen all the time.

The Arilou acts kindof strange, moving in a snake-like pattern.  It is similar to the original game but not as fast.

I have improved the speed of the game, by limiting the AI function to run at only 24fps.  Turns  out it is quite processor heavy when there are lots of ships on screen.

Hmm, I was going to upload a preview build but since the new style rotations need to be fixed, I’m going to hold off on that until next week.

Not too much new to report this week. I spent most of my time fixing bugs, or reworking my old code. I did manage to get the Androsyn Blazer, and Melnorme primary weapon implemented.

Again, theres no new build this week because I just changed the way I render the battle area and it is not ready yet. Since I now know how to use rendertargets, I wanted to simplify my drawing routines. Before, my method of drawing was factoring in the scaling up of the sprites, the camera position, the camera scaling, the screen wrapping…. etc, on every object’s seperate drawing call.

But now I basically have a rendertarget the size of the play field and just draw the objects directly to it, either using their world position, or position relative to the camera. Then I scale that big image according to the camera scale and draw it to the screen, just once.

Unfortunately its not as speedy as the old way, but it is so much easier to manage if I need to modify anything. Its also handier since before, there was no way to viewing the whole playing field at once, but now you can! Consequently, if you dont have a decent graphics card, the game might not run at 60fps. And also the AI seems extra-dumb, so I need to debug and find out what I accidentally did to it. :p

Anyway, here is an image showing the whole battlefield. (its actually a composite of 2 frame grabs, showing around 24 ships total)