User blog:C3PO the Dragon Slayer/Back to work

If anyone cares enough to remember Ace and Commander, I'm pretty much done with it, so you can head over to here to play the game. To my pleasant surprise, the game has been played over 350 times and is rated over 4 out of 5 stars on a site with a pretty picky rating community. So far, the reception is very positive. If you haven't played Ace and Commander already, I recommend you go check it out.

Now, I must confess that I haven't been working much on either Avian Hunt or Ace and Commander recently. And my reason isn't actually laziness or loss of interest either. The simple fact of the matter is that my computer is... well... aging. It got to the point sometime this fall that the speed in just about any game I tried, including (especially) my Game Maker games, lagged more than what is humanly tolerable. Back when I was trying to submit the second demo of Avian Hunt and was consistently rejected, I had tried a free trial for McAffee VirusScan, but to my utter disappointment, it did not remove any viruses from my computer. All it did was pop up every half hour to alert me that my computer isn't protected and not giving me any way to fix that besides buying the uber-expensive full version. And there's no way to uninstall it.

Plus, I lost all sound on the computer, except for a disturbingly low-quality mumble from the computer box itself, which is both too quiet to hear anything and understand and too loud to ignore. And weirdest of all, turning up the volume on the monitor does nothing to enhance the sound quality, but just gives me a grainy radio show in Spanish. The peripherals and accessories behind the computer have become so hopelessly entangled that I have long since given up trying to fix it all. The graphics card has since become incapable of handling the large capital ship sprites used in Ace and Commander and I'm running out of hard disk space. The internet loading speed has slowed to a dial-up-like crawl. And the performance is even worse if I reboot the computer. The computer is still working, but it's a real chore to get progress done on Game Making, especially when I need sound and speed to test Avian Hunt reliably.

This changes today.

That's right. I got a new computer! Or really, I built one. Having bought the necessary parts at a computer store and put it all together, I have a much higher-quality machine in front of me than most affordable units. It runs Windows 7, and successfully ran Ace and Commander and the first Avian Hunt demo without any lag whatsoever. I find this very exciting. Once I get everything set up, I can do some extraordinary things with Game Maker that I wouldn't have had the patience to try on the old computer.

The first goal on the agenda is merging the engines for Ace and Commander and Avian Hunt. I want to have a similar structure to Ace and Commander in creating skirmish battles for the next demo, and the Ace and Commander engine provides me with virtually everything I need to assemble a large array of playable ships and weapons. I just need to make it 3D. The biggest obstacles, of course, will still be the AI, but now that I have had experience working with it in Ace and Commander, I am much more confident in my ability to program smart starfighters.

In the meantime, Yoyogames has been releasing new demos for Game Maker 8 and Game Maker of Mac (which I will need before I can make a Mac version). I am following these developments with keen interest, and Game Maker 8 has some features which will be very useful for making the strategy engine for Avian Hunt, such as trigger events and a better code editor.

Meanwhile, I have actually been working indirectly on Avian Hunt by composing new themes, such as [[Media:Vergere's theme.mid|Vergere's theme]], [[Media:Vergere's News.mid|Vergere's News]], and others which are still incomplete, but are turning out great! In addition, I've been creating background sets that I will eventually need to create different environments in the 3D portion of Avian Hunt. I've also been working on developing the story; I've cut a couple of levels from the game, so there will only be 16 missions, but this leaves me with more room to make these missions more engaging. I'm still stuck on UV mapping the starfighter models, but this is not an insurmountable roadblock that halts the entire project.

I'll post again when I have something visually appealing to show. In the meantime, know that I am once again working on Avian Hunt.