No, I’m not on strike…

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.

About Sokurah