Oops! Plus a Parallaxian WIP Update

Oops!

In my previous update I tried to extinguish some of the fires started by the unsanctioned release of a technical testbed of Parallaxian, but I carelessly made a couple of blunders.

First of all, I said that the culprit, PCOLLINS, was a member of Excess but it turns out he had left them by that stage and is now part of the Quantum cracking group, so I have apologised to Excess and corrected the mistake in the article accordingly.

Perhaps worse, however, I rushed to provide a code snippet from the Parallaxian demo showing the FLD method I was using in the tech demo, given that You-Know-Who had taken aim at it in one of his numerous diatribes against the game as part of his neverending quest to discredit the project.

In my haste I didn't properly read what I was saying about my own code and, consequently, didn't properly count the cycles for a fully expanded FLD deployment, presenting him with a gift-wrapped opportunity to savage what I had written. This was an opportunity he gladly seized, from what I have been told.

So yes, I was sloppy and he called me out on it. LESSON: Don't be in a rush to prove a point, especially involving someone so passionately disdainful of you.

Back to Parallaxian

For the past 6-7 weeks I have been working flat-out most days on the game in a grand bid to get it finished before WW3 comes.

Due to the unsanctioned tech demo release in December, I have made many changes and ripped out huge swathes of code, removing things that add nothing to the game and replacing them with things focussed on producing better gameplay, for which policy I have the development of Seawolves to largely thank.

Without going into too many details, this is a list of what has been done since the last update:

• Panel zone redesigned and refined further, mostly to reflect the search-and-rescue aspects of the game gameplay.
• The new fuel and damage gauges have been designed, with the former now fully functional.
• The central shields indicator has been shrunk into a compact square and its new purpose (as far its colours go) is to let the player know when a colonist is below waiting to be picked up, and also when / where it is safe to land.
• A low level terrain-avoidance warning system has been added, as some levels have substantial obstacles that must not be crashed into.
• A new lives-remaining indicator.
• Satellite dish repair indicators - each level has 3 such dishes in need of repair and the player must locate engineers to ferry to those satellite dishes to conduct said work!
• A passenger indicator showing which kind of colonist, if any, is currently aboard the plane.
• A lock-on indicator (not yet functional) for when enemy homing missiles engage the plane.
• Some substantial redesign of the desertscape to freshen it up.
• A massive refactoring of the feed-in + scroll code for sprite objects littered around the landscape, with a new facility enabling "tall" or "stacked" objects.
• A totally new shadow generator.
• Some minor but noticeable redesign of the home base, most notably the addition of a tall radio mast.
• A complete redesign of the Hunter-Killer, as the original was too blocky and required too many sprite frames to animate.

Hunter Killer V.2.0.

Yes, the old design was (a) stale, (b) too blocky, (c) too tall, (d) consumed too many frames and (e) not "droney" enough, so I took some inspiration from the nasty drones in the Tom Cruise film, Oblivion, for the redesign. The image below shows the different variations I tried out in Photoshopped snaps of different game worlds en route to settling on the favoured new design.

Will I redesign any other major sprites?

Maybe, but only if it adds to the gaming experience or freshens things up.

Obviously the prime candidate for that would be the player's plane, i.e., the Figment itself. After all, when I first designed it back in 1995, Flankers were all the rage but nowadays it's the sixth-gen stealth vibe that's red hot.

Any WIP Videos?

After the damage done by the December debacle, I am in no mood to publicise the game before the eve of its release, and so I maintain my stance that there will be no more previews emailed out and no WIP videos to further soften the impact of the game.

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