User blog:C3PO the Dragon Slayer/Avian Hunt: January 22, 2009

January 22, 2009
This is a heads up. The next demo for Avian Hunt will be coming soon. How soon, I'm not sure. I realize I haven't posted much on my progress in recent months, but to suggest I have not been working on it would elicit the most hysterical of laughter from anyone on this side of cyberspace. Here's a little summary of my progress:


 * 1) The transformation is complete. Avian Hunt is now completely compatible with Ultimate 3D.
 * 2) In a version I put together for a school project, I added an on-screen walkthrough that instructs players on how to play.
 * 3) I have other ships flying around. Including Vulture Droids and Star Destroyers. And you can shoot them.
 * 4) *The response to the laser shots is still iffy. I'm working on the explosions and detection.
 * 5) I have a randomly generated map, which includes a city that you can fly through, and great-looking hills.
 * 6) Collision response! Fly your ship into the ground, or into a building, or into one of the Star Destroyers, and you'll bounce off instead of go through.
 * 7) I almost forgot to mention the mouse controls. You now control your fighter like you do in the Battlefront II PC game.
 * 8) I do have a menu system up, but I just spend today tearing it down and rebuilding it. The menus are for ship and terrain selection, though right now you only have one ship and one map that works. Once I'm sure I finished the menu system (this will be critical in the strategy engine), well, that brings me to the ability to make the next thing I've been making progress on much more obvious:
 * 9) While you don't have a built-in ship selection right now, I do have, in the source code, programmed parameters that can let the player play as 17 different ships. These include some classic Star Wars ships like the TIE fighter and the ARC-170 in addition to new made-up ones like the Eta-3.
 * 10) Music. Not only did I just finish Civilization, the final battle music for Avian Hunt, but I made a nifty playlist feature that takes a directory of midi files and plays them in a random order. Just like in the last demo, you can skip a music piece by pressing M.

Here's a list of things I want to do before I publish this next demo:
 * 1) Utilize the rooms feature in Ultimate 3D to speed up collision detection. This is probably the most challenging of the tasks.
 * 2) Finish the menus system. I'm pretty much done, but I'm still extending it, and I'd like to turn them into a Game Maker extension package, which makes it more publishable and easier for me to program with.
 * 3) Make the lasers prettier and more laser-like, get the Vulture droids to explode instead of disappear.

And that's basically it. At that point I have a full flight engine. After that I'd of course like to improve enemy AI (right now they just fly in circles).

Anyway, that's the Avian Hunt news for now. Keep your eyes open for the next post, which will probably link you to the next demo!