beerman's blog

Clock's ticking if I want to get Sheep Snaggers 2 finished by the end of year deadline, and I've not touched it in months. Too busy twatting around with other stuff.

So I'm looking at the code for the first time in fuck knows how long, and basically it's a big heap of shit. What asshole wrote this crap? Oh wait...

Think I need to just throw the lot away and start again. maybe do some actual design this time...

I've noticed the frame rate on Gun Bastard has a tendency to plummet when things get a bit splodey, so I should probably start looking at optimising the code a little before I go any further.
Since the explosions are the most obvious source of slowdown, at least some of the problem is likely down to object creation overhead on the various particles I'm chucking about the screen.

In order to minimise the overhead, I thought I should investigate object pooling.

I found the rather excellent looking 3D Heroes via the TIGsource forums.

I love the 3D pixellated look they've got going on there - think I might have found the aesthetic I was looking for for my Space Harrier game.

Spent a bit more time playing around with Gun Bastard this weekend, so here's a quick WIP build for you to play with.
Needs a lot of work on balancing and generally making things fun, but it's just about playable.

Download Gun Bastard v 0.1

Been a busy weekend, but I managed to find half an hour tonight to play with the Space Harrier code.
Refactored a few things for readability and general tidiness - shadows are now handled as a class rather than just a special case of Sprite, and die along with their parent rather than hanging around in spooky fashion.

Thanks to StarshipUK, here are the high scores from the Console Combat Markie's Revenge competition. Impressive work chaps - can anyone beat these?

This is cool as all hell!
http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2009/08/03/sticky-light-scorelight/

OK, so it turns out I fail bigtime at maths :(

The code I had looked reasonable for the background and flying enemies, but trying to add some ground scenery - the trees and bushes - exposed just how broken it was.
I was hoping to have a demo available, but it looks like I need to go right back to the drawing board and actually read up on how 3D projection works...

I absolutely fucking *love* Motörhead. So when I found out they were playing on my birthday I had to have tickets.

Lucky for me I've got a goddamn awesome wife - thankyou Vikki! I love you!

Currently contemplating whether or not to stay an extra night and catch another of my favourite bands - Skunk Anansie are back together and playing the same venue on the saturday!

Little something I've been playing with over the last couple of days. The latest Retro Gamer had a couple of mentions of Space Harrier, and somewhere along the line my brain went "hey! I could do that!"
So once I got back from Console Combat I thought I'd have a shot at knocking up a quick demo version...