weekly #3 July 29

is here: weekly3

I need to figure out how to get the SWF to load the level from the proper directory as a feather so I can just post these things rather that mucking around like this.

This weekly is probably going to end up being 2 weeks, as we want to spend a little more time fleshing it out. Also, I need to post weekly #2... I forgot about that one.

coalesce notes (some story) October 26

Idea: (shot down) a domestic drama about the life of the captain of the ship's wife while he's at war. Guns rotate like in Slipheed? Move forward, they spread, move back, they contract. Hold down the fire button & they lock. Need to work on the rotation of ships being part of the Ship class –– have the side-guns locked on to the side of the ship, rather than just have the same movement vector. Because currently they're bumped around by the powerups. Also, they need to be destroy-able. Sprites for the ships + rotation of sprites. Moving background? – that involves redrawing the whole scene. But... don't I already do that? I should draw & erase the ships to a BMP that's the size of the whole level, and then draw the current viewport to the screen. Yes?

My goal should be to make my code as clean & understandable as possible first, & then go back & optimize at the end. For the Gunners, do I have them loop through the objects to pick a target?? Because I don't need to. Naww, I just did extra testing to be safe. Take a look @ my collision code: clean that up. First off, the collision fn. should return a boolean.

Fix the attachments so they don't bounce around. "fix" the missles so they can miss fix the flockers so they're not batshit insane (x,y) of the powerups occasionally gets set to NAN... ?! I'm sure it has to do w/the collision detection on them, which shouldn't happen. Maybe I should check for division by 0 somewhere...

more October 26

Are side-guns going to be done as separate sprites? Or the main ship's sprite modified? The way it's looking, separate sprites – not sure how ships of different sizes / shapes will take the same side-gun, but that's Mike's problem. As much as possible should be put in the Ship class. Certainly the stuff about the Attachables. Technically, enemies can take missles now. Just need to edit the fire methods. *I should have generic fire methods for all ships. Take either a direction or a target, and that's it. Works for both the player and the enemies.

Are the upgrades for the player & the enemies going to be exactly the same? control: 3 buttons: (A) left-gun (B) right-gun (C) both NO center-gun? *The center-gun is the basic, no-side-gun weapon. It's replaced by the first powerup the player recieves. It'd be interesting if the player could somehow power this weapon up, by avoiding all weapon pickups. But how?

Need a HUD to display: score, power of each weapon **what about varying qualities of each powerup? ie the "level" of the weapon based on how many like powerups, and then secondary parameters...

I can get rid of the save-state function, right? Do I really need it? unless I erase after I've updated the positions...