Hitting the road.

Howdy folks,
Been up to a bit since my last entry, so here's a bunch of what's happened in roughly chronological order:

With the kind guidance of Torqued from the #tgb irc channel, I've added mouse-wheel zooming which is just overall nifty. Being able to 'step back' and view the random chaos, and then zoom in, possess an Avatar and orchestrate it is keen.



I've implimented two core functionality features I've had in mind - Levl transitions and Entity mounting. The transitions are mostly just about making sure the old is cleaned up before the new is begun, and that all seems to be moving smoothly. Entity mounting is currently prototyped with my test car and Rufus, who can mount, drive & unmount the vehicle. More than just being about adding one sprite to another, it also meant things like adding cutscene functionlity to Entities in general, so that they can be moved into the correct positions on mounting and dismounting.



Shortly after this, I encountered my first major hiccup. Items in-world that can be triggered by Avatars can also be enabled for triggering via mouse click, in Sandbox mode. To my horror, triggering level transitions via mouse seemed to apparently cause random crashes. They didn't always happen, and when they did, there was no obvious cause. I suspect the level transition was pulling the rug out from beneath something related to mouse handling, and was happy to discover that delaying the triggering of the clicked on object by a hundredth of a second was a workaround that seemed to prevent the crashes altogether. I've since clicked through 50 level changes in a row without any problems, just to make sure it was all behaving, and also cleaning up properly on level transition, which appears so.

While working on resolving that issue, I discovered that Gyhart actually works fine when triggered from within the TGB Level Builder tool. Will have to bear that in mind, might be able to make some things a little quicker to put together.

Next, I set out to add a simple solid object to block movement, something I thought would be quick and simple.

Heh.

Several days, a redesign and a signal/sensor system rewrite later, and my sensors were no longer causing unwanted physics reactions. The day that I come to be an understanding user of the physics/collision systems will be a very happy day for me.

Now, I'm working on my first non-test entity, Biped2, which will handle inputs differently (closer to Alien Shooter than GTA2), and hopefully form the base for many of my future toys.

While playing about on the way, I put together graphics for testing a quad-tracked tank in a style which I don't expect I'll be using, so I'm offering them here for anyone that wants some coder graphics to play with. The graphics are .png with alpha channels for a tank and 3 turret variations, one of which is animatable, wrapped in a .zip file.



quad_tank.zip

Hope you're all having fun!