The website for our particle engine has a new dress. Inspired from github doc. Hope you like it.

(Image from flickr)

We are looking forward to get the public release done. At the moment some tickets are still open. A mixture of bugs, enhancements and setup related issues.

Not that much to get it done very soon but at the moment I have a really time consuming project called real life. This may not get better the next weeks but I hope from developing point of view to get the last tickets fixed as soon as possible.

For all of you waiting for the release please stay tuned. We are very close…

Anger offers the ability to have autoweapons. This weapons can be placed at the ground and will fire at the enemies within the weapons range. At the moment a cannon, laser and thermal rocket is available.

The screen above was the result of my nephew. He likes the auto-weapons and uses them quite often. There was already a ticket from fidel to limit the number of autoweapons by class. Bad news for my nephew :-). Only 3 autoweapons per class allowed in the future.

Sorry.

Most of the time I develop in the Mac OS X environment while fidel is testing under linux. The game provides some sound effects which worked only on the mac. We first thought about having a problem with the general problem with the soundengine on linux. Playing around with Open-AL, ALSA  and different sound configurations ended up all in deep silence.

I was close before giving up. Time goes by and I restart investigating the problem. I first checked the sound sample of SFML library which worked !

But why ? I compared the sources and then I catched the problem. To play sound the system uses two objects: sound and soundbuffer. I was using the objects but it did not work. What was wrong ? The solution is quite simple. The game uses multiple sounds and so I handled all sounds in a manager object. But the sound manager had one big logical mistake. Each time I accessed the manager to start playing a sound, the manager made a copy of the objects and started playing. The copy was the problem because after start, the object was destroyed (local scope). The destroy stops playing which results in silence :-)

Rewriting the storage of the sound objects the sound works now. Yeah!

We are very close to milestone 0.6 which means public testing release. This is the milestone with the most tickets worked on.

We are close to first public release. Time to get some stats:

A lot of features and effects have blown up the code. The self written particle engine for better effects takes about 2300 lines of code including comments. The engine may be introduced in a separate post if you are interested in.

Thanks to fidel for the never-ending ideas and the tests.