This Wednesday I have just two points: a new enemy model and a really nasty bug.

New Cannon Boat

This is the first nautical vehicle in Nordenfelt:

Hunting a Stealth Bug

Adding exhaust particle effects to the cannon boat unveiled a curious bug. Check out the following two screenshots:

The upper image shows a boat heading from left to right. In this case the unit has no rotation as the debug display “native rot = 0″ tells. The lower image shows the same boat pointing in the opposite direction, the unit has a 180 degrees rotation. Now compare the orientations of the exhaust particles relative to the boat orientations. Can you see the failure?

Today is the fifth day I’m chasing this damned bug. It’s a really tough beast. Hopefully it will be squashed soon to go on with more interesting stuff to show next Wednesday.

In the meantime feel free to subscribe to Nordenfelt’s RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @black_golem.

Cheers,
Thomas

After six days of fiddling around with the player ship I’m sick of it. It’s time for something new to work on.

This is the ship as it will be used in the arcade mode of Nordenfelt:

The small wings were mounted recently. This was done for one simple purpose: the birds-view shape did not look like a flying object. The wings are rather useless but provide a decorative hint at the vehicle’s flying nature.

Upcoming tasks on my todo list are making the playable level easier, adding some increments to the available weapon (upgrading) and many small tweaks like faster scroll speed or additional animations. I’m wondering when version 0.2 will be out. Hm…

Cheers,
Thomas

After some feedback I’ve changed the shape of the player ship. The engines became reduced in size and semi-covered by the ship hull, the outward-pointing guns are parallel know. Finalizing details like construction seams and rivets were attached:

I’m not really satisfied with the hull’s birds-view shape. The old hull was rougher:

I’m pondering if the engine covers should be reduced a little bit for restoring the “small hip” of the old hull shape.

What is your opinion?

Cheers,
Thomas

Upgrade Triggered Refactoring Avalanche

After collecting all feedback from version 0.1 the first point on the todo list became including upgrades in the arcade mode. That sounded simple. I added a new upgrade object type and integrated it into the collision detection system. Here the first problem popped up: Physical shapes were still represented as polygons, upgrade icons were going to be circular. There was a big “TODO: replace polygons with circles” in the code. OK, let’s replace the polygons with circles. I will have to do it anyway. The avalanche started sliding.

While refactoring the collision code and adapting file formats the latter became painful work. The data formats were simple sequences of numeric values. E.g. a 2D vector was just a pair of numbers and a circle was a 2D vector followed by the circle its radius. The lack of meta data within the files, declaring the meanings of the values, forced me to always reference the corresponding loading source code. That was cumbersome so it was time for the next refactoring step: replacing the old file formats with XML. Next job in the refactoring queue.

The newly integrated upgrades had to load their data from files. They needed sprites, animations and body shapes. The third refactoring job accelerated the avalanche. Hey, I just wanted to upgrade my guns! Oh, wait a minute… equipment needs new upgrade definitions, weapons will have different shoot layouts. Dammit! Next job enqueued!

After two weeks refactoring the hell out of the game all viral tasks were finished. It’s a good feeling that the Nordenfelt engine now has proper data formats, a faster collision detection and upgradable equipment. Now I can go on with the funnier things.

For example modelling the player ship.

The Arcade Player Ship

The poll for your favourite player ship design sketches elected concept G as winner:

Today I’ve made this 3D model from the sketch above. It is not finished yet. Details like plates, frames or rivets are still missing:

IMO concept G is a good choice. It meets the shmup guidelines (AFAIK them), looks steampunky enough and has two Gatling guns! What would our world be without Gatling guns?

Thanks four your votes!

Cheers,
Thomas

There where quite many answers to my call for your player ship favourites. I’m going to start modelling the finalist tomorrow.

If you haven’t chosen your favourites yet: Please drop me a comment here. The current top 3 are:

1. Concept B
2. Concept G
3. Concept F

Click to Enlarge

Cheers,
Thomas

Today I have drawn some sketches for the player ship. Some of them are not complete but the concepts should be obvious.

What’s your favourite design? What are your three favourites, ordered best first? What do you like about them? What would you change?

Click to enlarge

I’m looking forward to your comments.

Cheers,
Thomas