Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Goodness Gracious

So again we're experiencing major computer problems which gives the game a frame rate of something like 2 fps. This is obviously bullshit, but until I can get a new computer or somehow fix this one, I can't really do the stuff that's remaining on Chocolate Sauce for the first release. I have some new enemy art to load in, and that's about it.

One thing that has been done or is about to be done: I was talking with Paul about wanting to write a cutscene parser for VERGE as part of the work on Demon Lord Adventure III, which I could then use for all future cutscenes on Chocolate Sauce since writing cutscenes is horrible. He came up with an idea for a better "wait for entity" function that's pixel-perfect rather than relying on the entity movecode strings, which cause problems when you do a lot of things where entities stagger backward one step, etc. I've been writing cutscenes just by choosing an arbitrary number of ticks to pause the engine for entities to move and then trial-and-erroring that number, which is senselessly tedious. A parser is the ultimate goal, but implementing it would be crazy since it involves some kind of metacode. I'll figure it out.

That's mostly it--I've been busy with other stuff lately, mostly a new internship and the revival of my webcomic, The Man Who Hates Fun. I have so little stuff left to do on Chocolate Sauce Part I that it's stupid I haven't yet done it--until I can somehow get a computer setup that lets me check things at a reasonable frame rate, though, there's not really a point. That's not a good excuse but it remains an excuse.

Art I can do at least. I'll try to at least make the maps look cooler/finished by next week.