Actually I did make some improvements to shapes and physics files. But that's small stuff. The major accomplishments are HUD work and the ball melee attack. As far as the HUD goes, I've got everything working properly except the shield/health monitor. Crater has been working on the script for that, which will hopefully be successful within a few days. The only major thing wrong with the hud currently is that it is only supported by a 1280x1024 resolution (1280x640 with HUD). I might have to write a seperate script for each resolution (man HUD masking would fix so much).
The Ball Melee attack is about as finished as it can get. It works well except for a couple things.
One, when you drop the ball (by using primary fire) it will go through the whacking animation before it drops. Not a big deal, but still unwanted.
Two, for some reason after you pick up the ball and drop it again, a ball will remain in your inventory. It is not the same ball though and you will not get time for having it. In fact it will not even let you select it, but when you cycle through your weapons it will be there for a split second before it automatically switches you to another weapon. Not a huge deal since usually you die before dropping the ball anyway and it doesn't really effect gameplay, but again, unwanted.
Three, the last problem with the ball is that the actual "whack" happens too early in the animation, but I have no idea how to fix this. Using key frames in the shapes file seemed like a solution, but they don't appear to work for 'Weapons In Hand' sequences. Yet another undesirable effect that doesn't really effect gameplay. I've added a movie of the Ball Whack in the movies section.
And now that you've read all this, I'll announce that the latest Alpha version has been released! Complete with new HUD (minus shields graphics and only one working resolution) and ball melee feature. I'll include the script that allows insta-death melee attacks to the back sometime in the future, and I'll try to get a more resolution-capable version uploaded soon.
(Sorry Windows users. I took down the Windows file because frankly I haven't been able to get the damn thing working on Windows yet! I'll try to grab a PC to fiddle with over the next few weeks and I'll upload another zip file for you guys. But if you think you have what it takes to get it working and you don't mind sit files, be my guest!)
Posted by Tycho7 at January 27, 2005 08:04 PM