Saturday, January 24, 2009

Holiday time

I'm going on holiday for 8 days, so I won't be updating Plague during that time - this build seems to be bug free and is pretty fun (no one has complained yet...) so it seems like a good place to leave it for a week or two. 

I will however be reading up on NumPy, with a view to using it for my fire and explosion algorithms when I get back. Hopefully this will alleviate the worst CPU hog. After thats done it'll be time for adding lots of new fun stuff!

Monday, January 19, 2009

New Plague 3.12

The previous release had an error (from an incomplete copy/replace) that didnt allow it to make a main game. Odd since I tested that last night. Fixed now anyway.
... (2 days later)..
OK, so its fixed and UPLOADED now... ... enjoy!

Plague 3.12 - fun and speedy changes abound

  • optimised connected sets algorithm to calculate optimal cells only – builds maps faster 
  • made CA_tech demo more fun by letting player burn stuff and delete rocks, etc. 
  • “easter egg”: press “o” on the main screen for the test map. You can deposit stuff using numpad keys. Fun for making your own map and populating with soldiers, zombies, ammo, etc. 
  • Renamed Connected_sets to Partitions 
  • made zombie_normal slightly slower 
  • made zombie_massive turn slightly slower 
  • made bullet currently_penetrating only for blocking sims 
  • fixed logical error in bullet_collision. Bullets now interact with more than the first sim (eg: sniper rifle bullets kills MULTIPLE zombies in one shot).

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Plague 3.11

  • tweaked bullet properties to try to reduce computational load and weird looking reflections off blocks.
  • Realised I wasnt using melee_arc to determine whether or not something could be meleed. Now fixed. Zombies and survivors can now only melee things in front of them.
  • Realised is was calculating melee distances incorrectly. Fixed. Now zombies and humans will consistently correctly melee. This has the effect of making zombies more deadly.
  • Game is too easy – increased zombie_normal and zombie_fast health.
  • Zombies now react to being shot – they will run towards direction of incoming fire.

Plague 3.10

  • additional sprite art from Sean Lange
  • made zombie_hive counter decrease when zombie_hives destroyed
  • fixed creation of remains – this crashed python when uninfected humans were killed
  • added a timer to ai to make sims pick another destination after a few seconds (stops them getting stuck indefinitely)
  • added comments to sim “add sight tiles” code
  • (last version, whoops!) made it so that health and ammo “tick up” as you stand over them, no longer instant refills
  • increased animal burn_max so that zombies and survivors burn for a little longer

Friday, January 16, 2009

Plague 3.09

  • Code rewrite to make code more readable, use inheritance more, and do things in smarter ways
  • Some nice new sprite art / sprite improvements from Sean on www.blogger.com
  • Rest of sprite art upgraded to match Seans work.
  • Changing drawing order so UI drawn last
  • Reduced bounciness of some bullets (where the gun has a high fire rate) to decrease computational load
  • calculated bullet draw paths without physics_locations – new list: draw_locations made
  • fixed add_sim so that “effects” are always drawn

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Plague 3.08 bouncy bullets

So bullets are now more bouncy, but unfortunately they now bounce off more stuff, causing more calculations and this generally slows the game down. Painfully so when you have the minigun... I'll review this with the 3.09 release.

Thoughts?

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Plague plans

I'm planning on working on backengine stuff for the next few days, which wont culminate in anything visible to the player, but will make Plague much more expandable so I can start adding more game objects MUCH more easily; neat things like mines and the like. Hopefully there will be some speed increases in there as well.

If you find any bugs, or have any suggestions, please leave a comment and I'll see what I can do for the release after next.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Plague 3.08

As always, download from here: http://sites.google.com/site/plaguelike/Home

Wow this was a whole lot of work and time for little visible gain...
  • stopped reloading if sim has no ammo
  • improved sim panicking when on fire
  • improved sim searching when exploring
  • removed “sim not moved check” as should be irrelevant
  • improved square project to interact with circles
  • increased bullet elasticity so they can be bounced of blocks better (more fun)

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Plague 3.07 - mainly bug killing

  • made zombies and survivors panic and flee when on fire
  • grenade sprint throw “bug” removed
  • make incendiary the default grenade
  • fixed control bug where player would stop receiving input because input was not “fresh”
  • changed bullet physics so that embedded bullets actually embed all the time
  • reduced laser_pule_temp from 5 to 50 (necessary because embed bug fixed)
  • added 2000 burn damage to laser pulses
  • fixed text – I dropped some brackets when rewriting it...
  • reduced num_zombies to 60 again for speed
  • reduced zombie sight radius to 8 for speed
  • reduced soldier sight radius to 14 for speed

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Plague 3.06 - now with no memory leak

  • Eval is evil – it has a “memory leak” and its not as fast as a lambda function
  • removed eval from entire code base (whew!)
  • set battle game scale to 1 so players knew that there was a game to play (it was too zoomed out)
  • made zombie_massive more red to distinguish from zombie_fast and made it larger
  • increased sight radii to tempt players to zoom out
  • changed control scheme (mouse wheel weapons and QE zoom) – see instruction help page for more information
  • changed zombie_massive health from 5000 to 2000

Plague 3.05

  • Deleted unused game_states
  • updated ReadMe for typos
  • removed grenade dropping when player is dead/None (only added for my testing)
  • randomised shrub health
  • made zombie_hives bleed when shot
  • decreased gauss_rifle_bullet so it doesnt destory concrete_blocks instantly
  • fixed square_project so it doesnt automatically stop all things
  • decreased grenade health to 0.5seconds – more satisfying
  • increased normal and fast zombie speeds
  • decreased normal and massive zombie melee arcs
  • investigated massive zombies seemingly not taking damage – no error found
  • battle would not restart (while True loop with no exit) - fixed

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Plague 3.04

Today is a productive day!
  1. made zombie_massive turn faster
  2. draw_overlay for game_state and sims (bars, paths, indicators, etc)
  3. added health bars for zombie_hives
  4. reinstated sim indicators (as people dont like hunting zombies for ages), will make an option in the future so purists can turn indicators off
  5. stopped corpses going through blocks (turned on collision detection)
  6. made pickups square_project with blocks in collision
  7. added in trees to tech demo
  8. add fire to the tech demo


Plague v3.03

Should be faster (by quite a bit) and hopefully more enjoyable as well.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Plague v3.02 is out

The major change here is the addition of game states (so there is a title screen, help screen, etc) which will pave the way to option screens and scoreboards (and a strategic game state). 

The other neat thing is a "tech demo" where you can see rocks being desposited and my connected set algorithm find the "connected sets" of squares (which is part of why it takes so long to create a level).