Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Another Engine Update

Today I finally tackled one outstanding item in the Menu code, and wrote a proper "Apply" option for vid_mode switching; this means that it will no longer switch immediately as you browse through the available modes.

This is handled using Enable/Disable/Show/Hide calls on menu items, so I will probably end up going through the rest of the menus and seeing where I can clean things up with these. The Multiplayer New Game options are one for sure (actually this is now required as a result of game switching).

I've also added in better looking blood particles (optional and off by default, remember...), making it smoke, tracers and blood that have now been done. I think I'm going to leave the explosion largely as is; the reason being that a different effect would mean having to hack out the sprite, which in turn means that mods which use custom explosion sprites would break. This can get real ugly real fast; the classic effect is decent enough. I'll change the texture and number of particles, and maybe add some smoke to it, but I see no real reason to go further. Might do that tomorrow (day off work - whoo-hoo!)

One major bug reported - a crash on changing from Start to E1M1 in ID1. I've seen this once before, but haven't been able to reproduce it since, so it will like stay unfixed.

The next release will also include source code for two utility tools I wrote; the first one will take a greyscale bitmap and construct a PNG with an alpha channel from it (handy for making particles), the second one is just for creating the DirectQ splash screen (just writes the version number into a bitmap). Neither are essential or awesome, but I've decided to include them anyway just to keep everything complete. Anything else I write as a development or content creation aid will probably also be included in future releases. All GPL, of course. For these I generally use Visual C# 2005 Express, still my favourite for Windows GUI work.

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