No news is good news?

Nope, not in this case.

So in my last week of holidays I decided to add RTS controls to the game. But when I went to look at the existing codebase to add the new systems, I found a horrible "complexity bomb" waiting to go off (marginal improvements took exponenially more time to implement due to a design and construction of systems that dont scale up well). Which, if memory serves is why I stopped working on this a while back and started studying code design and construction properly.

With my new found knowledge, I decided that I could fix it, and so I started to with gusto, but as the days rolled on, I decided it might be better to start from scratch with a new clean engine designed to handle the complexity I want to throw at the game (no offence to myself, but its a terribly designed and constructed game engine for the amount of complexity I've added in. Not bad for a first attempt at programming though and a very good learning experience :P ).

So I started investigating Panda3D and BlenderGame (designed and constructed by teams of people who knew what they were doing), and thats when I ran out of holidays.

Right now I'm in the middle of a transition from happily employed in NZ to unemployed (hopefully short term) in the UK (hopefully long term). This happened right at the end of my holidays which is why there hasnt been an update since my last until now (haha). The transition of course doesnt leave a lot of time for other things, and so work on Plague is on hold, indefinitely. I might next get a chance to look at it in June. But even thats massively unlikely.

In the meantime, Plague is of course openSource, so if anyone wants to go and gut the beast and recode a new shiny engine, or better yet take the parts you like and put into an existing shiny engine, feel free. I've already got a sourceforge etc setup, so if anyone wants access, shout out. I'd just like to be able to contribute again in the future, as time permits.

Has it really been that long?

Wow. I knew I hadn't done any development for a while, but I didn't realise it had been that many months. Blame training for a sports event, too much work and a slew of excellent games culminating in (a much delayed but sublime) Fallout 3. That's the best game I've ever played (if quite buggy). Browsing the mod scene for Fallout 3 has lead to me a "28 days later"mod for Oblivion... I'll try to resist installing that and get back to programming with my remaining week of holiday but no promises :)

Fort Zombie

Wooooo. Kerberos are making a zombie game that I want to play (which is what Plague will eventually be)

http://sots.rorschach.net/Category:Fort_Zombie

If you like Plague, it might be worth keeping an eye iout for Fort Zombie, I certainly will be waiting to give it a play.

Plague 3.39

Not much in the way of changes from 3.38 from a players perspective - I've just recoded some of the engine stuff - treat as a beta-ish release since all manner of bugs can crop up (although I think I've squished them all so far). Main reason for release is so the dll pack isnt needed.

Plague DLLs

I've just uploaded a 1Mb zip file of dlls for the windows version of plague. Unzip them into the same directory as the plague.exe. This fixes the missing "mixer" error message.

This seems to be caused by developing on Win7 - weird. It's kind of ugly having all the dlls there, so I will probably compile on winxp from now on (doesnt seem to be a quicker answer for sorting this out, but I'm happy to be proven incorrect).

Plague 3.38

So I've just picked up Code Complete, and I'll be reading through that before working on Plague - see if I can learn some stuff to reduce the complexity in Plague to increase the speed of development.

I'll probably then refactor/recode large amounts of Plague with better coding practices which will mean no visible development for a while - hopefully there will be speed improvements though and the end product should be much easier to continue development on.

The plan is then to stop working on the "battle" simulations and get onto the strategic game layer. Adding features to the battles can resume once theres some more context for them.

I've also picked up a couple of AI programming books. Once I've worked through those I'll upgrade the AI infrastructure from a state machine.

As always, if anyone wants to work on this, feel free; either drop me a line in the comments or send me a gmail to benedictnz.

One thing that would be particularly good is a fast implementation of an A* like pathfinder - I've got one written in python, and its good (and since its written in python, easily modified) but with 10AI using it things get kinda slow.

The other issue thats been bothering me for a while is the simulation will "pause/lag" for a fraction of a second every couple of seconds when doing grunty calculations (eg: calculating partitions during the tech demo). I have no idea why. Does this happen to you? If so, do you know why? If so, can you provide advice or a fix? If it doesnt happen to you, can you let me know your system specs and OS?

• Finally fixed annoying ammo bug (I think) - still some other bugs to do with removal of shrubs and rocks, but not worth worrying about right now.
• Added smoke trail to Rocket Launcher.
• Altered petrol dispersal from molotov grenade.
• Updated "kill" method of Sim.check_boundary()
• changed the way sim command destinations are updated (to decrease and distribute cpu cost)
• corrected 2 errors in resources.py that led to incorrect images for memorised pistols and shotguns
• improved manual map building functionality
• rocks create smoke when destroyed

Plague 3.37

• Fixed Bug: items could be dropped from inventory after they had been removed, leading to AI bugs where the AI would try to pick up the item (but it wasnt possible, so they'd become stuck). Similar bug (to do with blocks/hives/shrubs) may still be present... nasty bug!
• Survivor AI: Will now turn and fight if pressed too hard by zombies
• Ammo: Ammo generated as part of level recharges (eff. ammo crates)
• Survivor AI: Will now not try to pick up ammo which is mostly empty
• Rocket launcher now has a min_dist before explosion
• Survivors now start all over the map
• Floating point maths error with shadowing fixed (so shadowing always work properly now)
• Tweaked flamethrower stats
• Saved survivors now join your squad (max 4 for speed)
• Improved demo to include survivors and zombies (battle but without the player)

Todo:

• Need to reduce path finding updates (/or some other path finding speed optimisation)
• continue removing stupid ammo and block bug (grrr)