Arcade mode

I made a framework for the logic flow of the arcade mode, this is essentially managment of spawning ships as well as keeping track of several timers and ships alive. as of now if the capships AI were completed it should be done.

1 more week to beta

Over the last week or two I've finished out implementing the logic of all three of the tactical pods.

Big Bomb Pod: farily self explanetory, will track your targeted ship and when it explodes does AOE damage too all ships nearby.

Gravity Pod: Also a tracking pod, when it hits a ship it pull on all ships around it and if any ships get too close to the center  they are destroyed in the awesome gravitatious energy.

Slow Pod: Tracked to target, slows down all enemies based on their distance to the pod.

To accommodate all these pod types I had to implement a system to manage your active tactical pod and cycle through them.  

Spring Semester Catch-Up

So an update for this semester to this point, because I think this is possibly the first time I've gotten around
to blogging:

1) Pod System was originally completed in the 3.1 version of the game. Pods could be looted fired, consumed and such and stability was maintained.

2) The moved to 4.0 killed a lot of the previous code and much work as gone into just recreating the pods in 4.0, basic pods are now completely re-implemented in 4.0, including looting.

3) For the past two sprints I've been assigned to the collision system with felix that was completely redone and optimized. The world is now divided into smaller subsections we call grid objects, these gird object build a list of objects that reside within themselves and the collision is only ran on these objects. It is a fairly simple theory, but was exceptionally complex to implement.

4) while number 3 was only the collision detection, we had to implement the collision handling. We decided to as a standard have lower ranked entities handle collision against all higher ranked entities. So lasers must know how to collide with everything, but nothing has to have code to collide with a laser, because that is already handled by the laser. It's a hard to enforce rule, but with felix and I writing 95% of collision code it should work out.

Bloggin On

This week we did the playtest with our own classmates and tonight is the playtest with the
master eae students. The game came together a lot in the last 4 or 5 days. I spend the
majority of my time adding the the functionality and modifying the behavior of the pods.

Shield pods got an overhaul: They now can be used to gain temporary invincibility as well
as right before death a pod will be auto consumed (like a life) to keep the player alive.

Engine Pods: Now have the improved graphic and have a more pronounced effect.

Weapon Pods: the lock on now working allowed me to make the weapon pods heat
seeking missiles.

The other major feature I implemented recently was that enemy ships now occasionally
drop a new pod that will be auto looted to the player ship. The mechanic that had to be
written to make this possible was the functionality for ships to gather and use the pods
found in the environment.