Ethan

I only clocked two and a half hours today, but I'm pretty much dead tired, so I figure I must have worked more than that, but didn't clock it, reading/writing emails especially.

At Carl's behest today I wrote up some mechanisms to allow images to be controlled by special sprite classes, for example the PulseSprite which does a rotozoom on its image before displaying it. Turns out to be a pain for efficiency, so we're dropping the use of it, but it's still there; it's pretty handy for visualizing how something will look if it shrinks/expands without actually drawing it. Also, you could optimize this by precomputing all the sprites, but in the here and now that's probably not needed.

We've been kicking ideas around for training3. The current training3 is important but too short, so we're talking about merging it with training4, but what would be a good concept for another training level? There's really not much left to cover. We can toy with the player some, but what kind of torments would the humans devise for their trainees?

Debate continues to rage regarding the space station. I wrote the code to scale the sucker and I must say it looks pretty good. Carl's pretty insistent that it's too hard to draw 14 distinct-looking overhead sprites, and I'm pretty skeptical that turning off inertia-based maneuvering but keeping the rotational dynamic is going to play well at all. Plus it might be slower, which for the station level is a big deal. I'll probably try to do what Chiz wants tomorrow, but we might keep it a zero-g station which has people inside it. Then Carl can draw people in Superman-type poses; I have no idea how he'd find the time to animate them too, but hey, gives him something to do while I finish healbeam7, create healbeam4 from scratch.

Lots of activity, and a perilous amount of rewriting stuff considering how close we are to deadline! (We wanted it to be today, but now we're talking next weekend.)

Ethan

Ethan

Lack of postage lately; I know, I know, I'm very naughty. Anyhow, here's what's up:

• Bit Shifter is too busy to do music for us; this sucks bad, since none of us have anything like the talent he does. But we'll survive somehow.

• Debate rages on the alexandria-devel list regarding how to do the station levels. You can't just fly around the inside of a space station; it's unbelieveable. So maybe we'll shrink the space station, and make there be human form. I think this is my next priority -- see what kinds of changes I'd have to make to allow that and see whether it's actually fun or not. If not, of course, we ditch it.

• healbeam7 is beginning to take shape; none of the game mechanics are in there yet, but at least it looks OK so far.

OK, back to work.

Ethan