Trapped Development Reboot

Hi there! It’s been a long time since I posted anything here. What can I say? It happens. Some time ago, my computer started to fail during my gaming sessions. Two or three crashes on one evening started to become common… I could not find the problem in my drivers or hardware so I decided to re-install Windows XP and start from there… After wiping the HD I could not re-install anything because my copy actions would fail, or the computer did not want to re-boot, or I would get no display at all. Obviously, the computer was dying right there and then. So I bought a new one… with Windows Vista… which take time to get used to but so far so good. Oh well, I can use my old XP licence to get that running on the lady’s Acer Aspire One laptop I bought her. It now runs a Linux distro. I really dislike Linux.

Miraculously, Trapped compiles and works on Vista without a single change in the code. Man, it’s good, this Blitzmax.

After reinstalling all my tools and stuff I got back to coding and decided that it was time to add the front end. You know, menu’s and configuration options and stuff. Then I realized that the code that I previously created for my other games was lost in the HD crash, so I have to re-do all the menus, configuration and input code… I’m working on that now… Kinda boring, but you know, when you re-do things like that you have a chance to make something even better and I am really pleased with the new menu system. Also re-did the graphics driver and you can now select resolution, aspect (4:3 or 16:10), window or fullscreen and lots more. And all on the fly The game looks really nice on 1680×1050 in widescreen mode! I’m now busy with re-doing the key and joypad input and configuration code.

I also re-did the way all my systems load and save their configurations. I now have a main configuration system (or Type as it’s called in Blitzmax) which takes care of all this. My new systems are built so they can use this configuration system to load and save to. It saves all this on exit, and reloads on startup, after which my other systems can load from it… It saves me from creating loaders and savers for each piece that code that needs configurable options. And I can easily stuff all options into one big .ini file.

On the graphics front I re-did the explosions and went ahead with a ‘energy-like’ look for the aliens. I wanted to do alien spaceships but I got bored with that real quick! Also, as the game is about distributing energy to and from your ship and shield, it makes sense to make the aliens take some kind of energy form as well. This also creates the benefit that I can generate the graphics procedurally instead of modeling all those ships and guns. I love cheating.

That’s it for now. I hope to post more in a while with a first look of the aliens.