Today’s list of completed tasks:
- Made the torpedos work the old way. You’d think that was simple, but nope…
- Implemented long range scanners as a ship’s system (can take damage and go offline, can be repaired, code isn’t special-cased anymore)
- Implemented sector scanners similarly
- Fixed a long-standing issue with the way explosions were being handled so that they finally look exactly correct.
- Fixed a nasty memory leak with torpedos that was spewing errors to the console.
- Fixed a pair of cosmetic bugs with the damage indicators at the bottom of the viewscreen (specifically, the impulse drive’s indicator wouldn’t flash, and the indicators for the torpedo launchers were missing).
- Paused to consider.
The next system to implement is the viewscreen. The viewscreen wasn’t a ship’s system in the original Missions, but, to borrow an idea from Lunatic Fringe, why shouldn’t viewscreen damage make it harder to see things around you? Of course, I’ve never done a damage effect like that before, so it might take me a little while to get it right. I’m pondering whether to just skip that for now and move on to the computer and life support systems, which are the only other ones left to do. Doing the computer requires (finally) implementing crew commands, at which point I really should implement the crew themselves, so that’s a bit of a larger subproject. Life support is trivial, though, just a random factor every so often to bring down a crew member if the system’s damaged. All the code necessary for that is already in place.
What exactly was downing crew with the life-support damaged? Gravity malfunctions? Sudden oxygen desaturation? The fire suppression systems going haywire? I wonder about these things!
Maybe at some point I’ll go back to the LRS and made damage steadily decrease the range until they go completely offline.
Maybe after I’m done I’ll go back and add in a bunch of code so that people who want to play Missions 2 can turn on some kind of “Classic Mode” to undo all the tweaks I keep making. Of course, that’ll have to be an easter egg switch…
Stay tuned for further updates!
Hi,
Stumbled on this a while back I remember the game from when I had an Apple! have an iphone nowadays but am following along! keep at it! and if you make it work with a PC I will be forever in your debt! :)
Well, all the code is in Objective-C. I don’t use very many Mac-specific facilities (the drawing is OpenGL, and almost everything else is just logic), but Cocotron (the only Objective-C solution for Windows I know of) hasn’t been worked on much in quite awhile. I’m not sure I’d be up to a port, considering I don’t know enough C# to do a direct port and redoing it in C++ or straight C would be another total rewrite. I will look into it eventually, however :).
Oh my gawd.. Lunatic Fringe! I’ve thought about that game from time to time over the years (much as I thought about Missions and thought it was long gone), and I had no idea there was a way to still play it. I’ve followed your link and downloaded it, but my first attempt at playing crashed. I’ll try again later, though…
Hmm, good point. Doesn’t everybody know what ‘life support’ is doing? It’s just, you know, supporting life. If it’s not working, people start passing out. ;-)