Author Archives: Alex

Tying things together

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Alex

I’ve been working on putting everything together.  Fixing up placeholders like the spawning of ships being unrelated to planet position in LUA, attaching notifications to planetary invasion events, attaching sounds to planet lasers, that sort of thing.  While it’s more … Continue reading →

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Dust

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Alex

The significant new update is the addition of dust and, in general, an efficient way to track particles floating through space. It would be an easy problem, if I didn’t require the dust particles to react to external forces. Until … Continue reading →

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Notifications, save fixes

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Alex

I have finished the notification system, so important events are now announced to the player.  Currently this includes when a friendly planet launches an attack or when any planet is conquered.  While implementing the ability to save messages, I also … Continue reading →

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Significant updates, including increased AI variety

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Alex

I suspended work on the game for a while, but I’m back, and progress continues, with a substantial list of updates. Additional player weapons are re-enabled, switch weapons using the mouse wheel. The number keys still work, but may be … Continue reading →

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Where to go from here

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Alex

After the recent updates, I’ve arrived at the point where I’m making meaningful gameplay decisions every time I design another part of the game, where the decision are no longer obvious- not like the past, with design decisions like “Sound: … Continue reading →

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Satellites

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Alex

New this update is the addition of defence satellites.  Their stats are defined in their own XML file, and they’re plugged into the world through universe.xml, in the appropriate planet entry.  They fire on enemies of their home planet’s faction. … Continue reading →

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Planetary interaction, Lua empowerment

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Alex

A significant update today- I’ve retextured the basic projectiles to look more interesting.  I’ve also modified the XML to be able to dynamically load a texture for projectiles instead of requiring an index number to an internal array, so adding … Continue reading →

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Saving completed, sound issue sidestepped

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Alex

Saving functionality is complete.  All ships, projectiles, gravity walls, and of course the player have save and load functions which slot themselves into the relevant XML in the appropriate save directory, and restore themselves appropriately on load.  Which is, I … Continue reading →

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Saving: When and where

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Alex

Saving and loading is the task of the day.  I’m rapidly becoming comfortable with rapidXML (harr) now that I’m using it a lot in a short period of time. The question in terms of design, though, is save types.  Exactly … Continue reading →

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Planet data: More flexibility

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Alex

While writing the LUA “planetTick” function, I came to the conclusion that requiring modification of the C++ core to add new kinds of data to planets runs counter to the premise of user modifiability.  So I’ve added an “extra data” … Continue reading →

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