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

ANGER SVN Activity 2009.12-2011.03 from macfidelity on Vimeo.

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…

At that time core was just implementing some enhancements to  our Stage-Clear screen – basically adding 2 ingame-screenshots of the last  stage.

The idea behind that change was to add more player-individial/specific informations to that screen – screenshots from the last played stage might do the trick for us.

While testing this new enhancement i realized a small but funny & really good looking bug which happened only rarely. To be honest – it happened once.

You may ask

A simple bug … isn’t it?

Well yeah – i call it ART  ;)

Since the start of our ANGER-development project the game had only 1 game-mode. The entire game idea was based on manually/scripted levels if it comes to enemies, timings, positions etc.  That’s fine on the one side – as you have total control over each game-sequence – but it caused tons of work on the other side.

Some weeks ago i had a pretty spontaneously and for sure stupid  idea

Let’s add another game mode to ANGER – a ‘never-ending’ auto-generated level with a growing amount of randomly spawning enemies.

Core’s reply was short & simple

Love it. Great idea.

We did finish with a first play-able version of that second game-mode, called it survivor  and  well … we’ll add it to our coming first public build (milestone 0.6).

2 Screenshots from a test-session with 0.5.19 on linux

Wave 124 was the killer for me ;)

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.

Closed tickets per milestone

The red bar is the general ‘overall amount of new closed tickets per milestone‘ – which is put together by our different ticket-types (enhancements vs bugs vs discussions) and some special resolutions (duplicates vs works-for-me vs wontfix).

Overall we have 425 closed tickets since our first build … an impressive number from my point of view.

What else?

Well …. a lot – but for me the most important enhancement in the last 2 weeks was our new second gamemode ‘Survivor‘.

While our main game-mode ‘Campaign’ is basically a scripted level-scenario based on campaigns & subdivided in levels or stages the new ‘Survivor’-Mode is fully auto-generated. A single level with growing enemy-waves and a simple target for the player

Survive as long as possible.

Believe me … its getting hard ;)

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.

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.