Zania dev journal day 13

It’s been a while since I last updated on the progress. Well, things has been hectic. You should probably head to the flash file itself to see. Make sure you click on the stage that opens up so that it’ll start capturing your keyboard events.

Use arrows or wasd to maneuver and space to shoot.

Bug fixes

I fully fixed the physics of bullets so that angular rotation of player ship as well as the ship’s momentum affects the bullet’s trajectory. On top of that, I fixed some trigonometry errors in my formula to calculate where the nuzzle of the ship is. While a long ship is rotating, the angular force on the bullet is greater as the nuzzles are farther away from the center of the body.

Additions

It’s beginning to take too much time to single step through the code to debug physics or some new mechanism. So I added an administrative debug interface as an overlay. It explains why the HUD is so messy right now. The released version will have it cleaned up, but I don’t have time to design the release HUD at this stage.

The major milestone reached in this build lies in the implementation of player save files as well as a working inventory system. These are done through remote loading of xml file. And yes, I had to code a xml parser for that. Eventually migrate to PHP calls to mysql databases. Again, too ambitious at this stage.

Architecture

I spent many an hour with my head in my palm chasing after chains of thoughts in the dark. Figuring out how to connect the code’s architecture through Aggregator and Singleton class. The class structure for aggregator is very alien from what I’ve learned up till this point in life. So it was equivalent of a mind fuck in exploring how to do it. All this because I want to be able to scale this up if I want to in the future. It is both a satisfying and frustrating experience because I just want to get a product out first and here I am stuck working on something that end users won’t see at all, nor appreciate.

Art

I drew a few ship designs on paper and realized the vector art through adobe illustrator. If you have seen the demo before, you’ll notice that the player ship’s style has changed dramatically. I still had some problem porting the separate parts to Flash, but the basis of the work flow has been established. The rest is just details which will be left till before the first release. As mentioned before, I will be using pure black for foreground objects in order to improve performance. Something that is very important in flash because of how cpu intensive it is.