Rip Off nearly done

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.

Good news…and bad.

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. 🙂

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.

So…what’s new?

…nothing much really.

I haven’t really worked much on any of my projects for a week now. Project Future is still coming along – just very slowly. What’s holding it up is a friend of mine, who’s promised to make the final bits of graphics for it, but he’s very busy at the moment, so I don’t know when it’s going to be ready. I’m optimistic about it being before the end of the year though.

So I’m distracting myself with Rip Off…if I’m not distracted by something else…like “Charlie Jade“. I’ve been watching the entire season over the past week (along with a few obligatory movies), so there haven’t been much time to do “computer stuff”. If you haven’t heard about “Charlie Jade” before (hell, two weeks ago I hadn’t), I’ve seen it referred to as “a sequel to Blade Runner – in spirit” which is a pretty good description – even though it’s about parallel universes instead of replicants. It’s good though, and now that I’ve plowed through all 20 episodes I can get back to coding.

One really annoying thing about programming, is that no matter how meticulous you are, you’ll probably see bugs anyway. As soon as all the different parts of your program starts to interact, the bugs will pop out and annoy you. I’ve had 3 bugs in Rip Off for a while now, but I’ve just eliminated one third of my problem. Yay! Now onto the two others. They’re hard to replicate though, so I’m not sure what’s causing them…but I’ll fix them dammit.

As it stands, Project Future and Rip Off are both nearly done – we’re talking about 96% for both of them, so they probably won’t be released too far apart.
Just don’t hold your breath…they’ll be done soon, but not that soon. 🙂