Current engine status
Entry posted by Katuko
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Things have stood rather still the past few weeks, at least as far as game development goes. Due to a slew of school work and other things, I have not found the drive for heavy programming. I have at least completed a new ability or two for the old BIONICLE Fighter game engine, and I will upload these as soon as I polish them a bit with sound effects and stat tweaking.
I have unfortunately not succeeded in fixing any of the crashes that occur on Windows 8 whenever certain abilities are used. For this reason I will instead implement a very sad countermeasure: A Settings button to temporarily disable the problematic powers. This will keep Toa of Lightning from using their secondary, and it will keep the Exo-Pyro boss from using its multi-fireball attack. It will instead fire a single fireball, while Toa of Lightning will get a lesser version of Chain Lightning. Please note that this is a completely optional setting meant for those who have trouble running the game as-is, and once I manage to fix the crashing it will be removed again.
The new engine is still just in the planning stages. There are lots of things that need to be planned in advance, so that I don't run into the issues I have with my current engine: Bloating of file size, slow and inefficient code, and a rigid system that can't easily be added to. I am working on splitting up sprites, recoloring them, and making new position arrays for keeping track of equipped items on your character. This will lend itself to a better and more flexible animation system, but it will also take time to finish. Until I get a system I am comfortable with I can unfortunately not move on to programming the rest of the revised game engine either. However, once the baseline is done, it will be rather easy to port over all the attacks etc. from the current game. While there will be changes in the way the stats work, and in the effects of some abilities, most will stay the same and thus need no real reprogramming.
What you are all waiting for, though, is multiplayer. Multiplayer is finicky, but I am looking at ways to make it work right. I've posted a connection test before, which worked for two players in a simple shooter environment. Once I figure out exactly how to structure the networking to work efficiently with all the things that BF needs to keep track of, I will put together a new demo for you to try.
Keep checking my topic; I will be posting sprites and other tidbits there as they get done.
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