Weekend update

I havent posted Plague 3.36 yet as I'm still working on randomising level generation. The new flamethrower is pretty fun and I've rewritten collision detection to be much faster. Should have a new release in a few more days (as I dont get much time per day to work on it).

Plague 3.35

I didnt get as much as I wanted to do done today, due to unforseen events. That said, I:

• Added end of level stats showing your cumulative kill count etc (I'll put in discrete kill count as well next time)
• refactored: simobject rmeoval to remove a bug
• refactored the cellular simulations for heat and shockwaves to take time as an input variable, and made them update at varibles rates (trading accuracy for greater speed)
• increased sim sight radii - need to see further for explosions - Plague is probably too easy right now, dont worry, I've got something planned that you'll either love or hate :)
• improved smoke art - it was uuuugly.
• turned off pre-processing of line of sight by default (turn on in options if you want)

Stuff I didnt get done that I'll try for next weekend:

• Flamethrower (now I've sped up the fire)
• cave system type level generation
• city type level generation
• random level type
• level generation paramerisations randomly picked to increase level unpredictability
• add more survivors, less weapons and make them start at random locations

Plague 3.34 redux

I'm just uploading 3.34 again. I was mucking around with the smoke and opaque smoke costs a ridiculous amount of CPU time. I have therefore set smoke opacity to zero, and now Plague runs nice and fast - smoke is just eye candy now. Gutted. Anyway, if you get the source version you can put make opaque smoke (simdata.py line 1499).

Plague 3.34

It's been a long time since my last release! (I've been playing Gothic3. Sacred2, Prototype, Viking, Too Human in my weekends). That said, I think I'm through most of the games I want to play, so we should be back on track for regular development of plague.

Plague 3.34 changes:

• Survivor AI now essentially event based where possible
• Survivor squads added back in (use "V" to issue orders). It's not perfect, but it works good enough for this release.
• I've added a Rocket Launcher (so much fun) - it needs decent art and sounds...
• I've added smoke to explosions that is (poorly) physically modelled - yeah, it's really slow, but its kinda cool to look at and it obscures vision (I need to cleanup the collision code to become event based to help speed this up)
• Survivors now dont bump "hard" into each other, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the friendly collisions now
• Survivors dont get hurt by bullets, and they dont check their fire. This means you can shoot safely past friends, which is a major change. I basically got sick of trying to sort out formations not blocking your line of fire and decided this was an easy quick fix. I might change this back in the future once formations work well again
• Loads of small code fixes/cleanups
• I've changed the players avatar color to be easier to differentiate (I was finding it hard).

Plague 3.33

The survivor AI has had a comprehensive rewrite. Survivors now remember the state of the map and utilise this information while they prioritise actions, and they plan their journeys accordingly.

I have disabled survivor formations and orders for this release (I'm out of time this weekend). I'll add that back in the near future.

I'm not convinced the state machine I've designed is the best one possible (I'm fairly sure there's a couple more rewrites from me as I gain more experience/need more performance). If anyone has experience with writing state machines or planning state managers and wants to help out with designing and/or coding, I'd love to hear from you.

Plague pathfinding

I added pathfinding to Plague last night (Eli Bendersky's python algorithm - thanks Eli), so survivors and zombies can be a whole lot smarter. It'll take a little while longer to re-engineer the AI to take advantage of that, and then I'll post a new release.

Plague 3.32

• Game mode system is now functional - allows the user to resume games (eg: after going back into the options menu). 
• Improved survivor graphics from Sean Lange.