I’m a Technical artist by trade.
And the SHMUP Creator is my first C++ project: I’m learning as I go. I started to modify a sample and try to display a bullet on screen, then I tryed to understand what is object oriented programming, then I tryed to understand why Visual C++ gives me linker error messages with 150 @ characters etc.
In September I decided to do what I have never done before since I started the project: updating Visual C++ and all the libraries I’m using.
So, I did that…
Of course it broke everything, (API changes, compatibility issues etc.) and I had to modify the code for some weeks before being able to compile again. I converted all the shaders to .hlsl to get rid of .cg, which is now obsolete.
I also did something incredible: I installed Git and now I’m using GitHub. For devs reading this: don’t laugh. Until now I backuped my code manually. Which is ok because I’m the only dev, but which is really bad when things go wrong. Again, don’t laugh, please: It’s never too late!
MEMORY LEAKS:
I did a lot of work on memory: I xas doing very bad things, and memory was growing each time a level was loaded. It’s really better now and quite stable.
POLISH:
I fixed the grid, the update and import of textures, and added a lot of small UI improvements.
The Snap tool was working well, but was failing on some occasions. It’s quite robust now and really improves the 2D levels creation.
Some months ago I wrote a complex hack to add parallax to layers, and it kind of worked. But it was difficult to use and created a lot of bugs and unwanted complexity, as well as bugs with the translation and scale tools. I found another solution and rewrote the thing: it’s now really easy to use and allows users to add parallax to background layers, only for 2D games.
We also did some work on the weapons to make them more easy to understand. Sometimes its only a matter of renaming, or moving some part of the UI somewhere else… Same thing with the waypoints. I’m quite happy with the result.
BETA:
The documentation is almost complete, I added sounds for 2D games, and we are working on another 2D sample game called “Dominique’s adventures”. I’ll write about it next time!
NEXT MONTH, we:
.continue the Content and Artist documentation
.continue to clean the UI and fix bugs
.create all the sound effects
.create a lot of bullet patterns and include them in the package
.I hope to be able at the end of December to distribute an early Beta to some people
Fingers crossed!
S.
Nice, great work!