[epiar-devel] 0.2.0 Release Plans

[Christopher Thielen]

The audio bit -- who's doing that?

If anybody is done with their work, or will be in advance of the release date, please start a discussion of additional things to work on. No sense waiting around for 0.2.0 to release if you've got more time. :-)

I'm heading home for the holidays this week and will be doing a lot of Epiar work there ... so don't mind that 3/4 of the 'Still Waiting' objectives are mine.

Speaking of that - does anybody want shield flares? Take a look at 0.6.0 to see how it's done. There are two ways I can see this happening:

1. The Old but Good way:
0.6.0 did shield flares by taking the image of the ship to be flared, transforming it into a 1-bit image, then "fattening" that image by making 3 or 4 passes over it and applying the basic rule to the bitmap "if one of my 8 neighboring pixels is on, turn me on too", and then, with that fattened 1-bit ship image, it would use that as a mask and draw random TV static on top of the ship image. Combine that with a sinusoidal transparency (flare up and down) and you have yourselves a very fast, very slick shield flare that will even work in software rendering mode on a 500 MHz machine.

2. The New Idea
Use OpenGL for god's sake! One of the reasons we're suffering through learning OpenGL is to use it for eye candy effects exactly like this one. Think about creating the top half of an elliptical egg shape and applying a sort of Star Trek / TV-static texture to it, again with fading alpha values.

- Chris

On Dec 16, 2009, at 9:21 AM, Matthew Zweig wrote:

> One month since we tagged 0.1.0 and we're looking pretty good on getting 0.2.0 done on time (Jan 28, 2010 ).
> 
> Accomplishments:
> We've abandoned the 'Tag' minigame and Epiar is now a basic 2D space shooter. (Shooting, collisions, damage, explosions, escape pods,  etc)
> We have a variety of different Ships, Weapons, and 2 Engines.
> Epiar has basic culling and spacial searching so that we can handle hundreds of in-game sprites simultaneously.
> We have some interesting screen effects like shaking and lag.  Maoserr tried motion blur but backed it out.
> Maoserr has created PhysicsFS and Freetype branches for the windows build.
> 
> Outstanding Issues:
> Creating multiple Animations doesn't scale since each new Animation loads and parses a .ani file.
> Collision checking can be a performance bottleneck.
> The AI is really dumb.
> Distances and velocities behave radically different at low FPS.
> No image resizing.
> No resource manager.
> Freetype doesn't build via autotools yet.
> 
> A review of our milestone requirements:
> 
> Basically Implemented:
>> 	• Weapons and collision detection
>> 	• Explosions
>> 	• Ship Removal
>> 	• Fix pausing - all input should not make the ship rotate at all times
> 
> Still Waiting:
>> 	• HUD
>> 	• Navigation screen
>> 	• Basic audio support, esp for fires, dialog beeps, maybe engine accel noises
>> 	• Shield flare eye candy
> 
> Worked on, but never really done:
>> 	• Code cleanup - take our time and keep it pretty now, while she's still simple
>> 	• Lua cleanup
> 
> Canceled:
>> 	• Lua should parse the XML and expose those options in the Lua interface
> 
> What do people think?  How is Epiar looking?  Are we on track? Does anyone need any help?
> 
> Thanks,
> ~Matt Zweig
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