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. 🙂

Wow, an update…and big changes.

Sir Lancelot
Hello, and welcome…

Everyone is blogging these days and now even I’ve changed my homepage to a blog.
Wohoo…no limit to my imagination.
🙂
These pages will primarily contain the results of my games programming – finished ones and previews of new ones (you will find my games in the menu to the right).

Now, if you’re a regular visitor you’ll have noticed that I haven’t really been updating the site that often – normally I don’t talk too much about what I’m working on, and only post whenever I’ve completed a game, but I hope that the change to a blog format will inspire me to update the page a little more often.

The plan, to begin with anyway, is to try and post something (at least) on a weekly basis. Not necessarily updates on what I’m working on, but also reviews, comments and thoughts on what’s going on in the world of remakes …and perhaps a rant from time to time…I’m good at that.
😉
Project Future is almost done and it won’t be long before it’s released.
The same goes for my remake of Rip Off which is about 95% complete.

Stay tuned….