Good news…and bad too – as always 🙂

The good news is that I got some feedback on Rip Off from Oddbob and it was good – the only thing he mentioned as bad was a slight framerate dip for no apparant reason occasionally- which also happens to me. I don’t think it’s so bad in singleplayer mode – on my pc anyway…but it’s there and it’s annoying.

If my PC can play Bioshock it should, sure as hell, also be able to play Rip Off
(ok, I don’t get the best framerate in Bioshock either, but still…) 😉

I also had a friend over on monday night and we played the two-player mode for two solid hours and it was really fun – just like 25 years ago in the arcades…only we didn’t have to spend a lot of money on it. So it was great fun, and seemed bugfree, but unfortunately the slowdown Oddbob mentioned is worse in two-player mode because there’s more things on the screen.

So the bad news is that I can’t release the game this week, as I’d planned, but have to put on my thinkingcap instead and try to find out what part of the program causes the slowdown. Is it the 1000+ cos/sin calculations each second or is there particular function somewhere that is the cause of it?…that’s what I need to find out before I release the game.So it’ll be a little while longer before it’s completely done.

UPDATE:
I felt like experimenting last night, but since I had no athletic 25 year old blonde girl handy I decided to poke and prod Rip Off instead.  I’m now pretty sure I know what’s causing the slowdown and I even have a crazy idea how to fix it, but it’s going to be a quite extensive rewrite – but it should eliminate the problem completely (if I can make it work that is).

Just last night I decided Rip Off was pretty close to being done, so I sent off a beta to Oddbob, to get his feedback on it.
Next week a friend of mine will come over with his joypad and we’ll give the game a thorough twoplayer testing.

Unless something is completely off, it’ll be done soon.

Ohh, and about my plan to port the game to Blitz Max? – I’d love to, but it’s not going to happen…not right now anyway. It’s simply too much work and I’d like to finish it before penguins rules the world. It’s a big loss, because I was really looking forward to have those beautiful glowing vector graphics, but as I said – It’s too much work. Perhaps later.

Argh…

Well, I suppose Rip Off is done…well, almost anyway. All the important bits are there and the game is fully playable and doesn’t behave in ways it shouldn’t. I still need to make a logo, improve the sound design and do a couple of menu-related tweaks and give some other people a chance to playtest it before I can call it absolutely done. One big hurdle has shown itself though – I had the plan to port it to BlitzMax so I could give the game a last minute sheen of glowiness (which is much easier to do in BlitzMax than in Blitz3D, but Rip Off is programmed in Blitz3D)…well, it turns out that BM’s ‘import B3D’ function is about as usable as a big pile of shit on a plate when you’re hungry – ie. not really what you were hoping for. Complete unusable!

So I’ve started a half-arsed attempt to convert it manually, but that’s a bitch thats riding me hard instead of letting me being the one in control.

So, what do I do? – do I take the whip and show who’s in control, or do I see if I can find an easy-to-use glow-function for Blitz3D?…or just release it as it is?
…I don’t know…even though everything is there, it just sucks to have to rewrite everything.
I’ll have to think about what to do, for a few days.

A bit of progress has also been done on Project Future.
– it’s getting closer and closer to being finished. 🙂

Luckily the WGA strike doesn’t affect people like me, because with the crazy amount of rewriting I’m doing to Rip Off, that would’ve stopped me dead in my tracks, and no progress would’ve been made (and it’s not like I’m getting sweat on my brow to begin with). 🙂

Anyway, time for a weekly update.

A while back I rewrote the core vector routine to be…better…and it was. But I’d written it as a standalone routine and planned to “just plug it in”. Well, if that was my plan I should’ve made it differently – like the one already in place, because the new routine was not only better, it was also very different. It wouldn’t have integrated very easily.

So a few days ago I wrote a new vector editor and now I have spent the weekend tweaking the existing vector routine to accept the new data format coming from it. And it works. Yay. It’s probably not much faster, but it’s should give me cleaner looking graphics in the end. Perhaps I’ll be able to use the new routine another time.

I got rid of another bug, but it wasn’t really a bug – it just looked like it. It was an oversight (Microsoft calls this a “feature”) 😉
See, the game supports two players. So I developed the code for both players simultaneously, but at one point I stopped coding player 2 and decided to just concentrate on player 1, and then copy all the relevant code to the player 2 file and adjust it. Which I did…I just missed one place, so in certain cases the enemies would attack player 2 but get their data partly from player 1, which made them behave a bit schizo.
Well, not more of that – now my enemies are not retarded anymore – just pissed off. 🙂

The current status of Rip Off are as follows;
* Some missing code – probably less than 100 lines left to do – all easy and trivial stuff.
* A couple more bugs.
* When the game is done, I want to up the resolution from 640×480 to 1024×768.
* When that is done, port the sucker to Blitz Max (currently Blitz 3D).
…then have a beer.