It took a good while, but the first release of the 1.0 version is here.

before jumping into the download link, it is important to know some facts about this version. If the game is to be compared with the 0.1 release candidate, it will seem to be a bit worse, with more bugs and less functionality; and the reason is that the code was fully rewritten in C++, that makes much easier to add new features but needs that a lot of parts that worked well before have to be redone from ground. Thus, biggest news are in the editor part, that now saves the game into a single file, that will simplify distribution for users, and have a new interface, more organized and with more options and items. Some features in the game include sliding, shielding and charged shot.

OK, now that you are aware about those news, download the game, test it, and tell us what you think about it!

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Starting the new year with lots of coding and new stuff in Rockbot. Check out in the following video!

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Hello all, sorry for the lack of news lately.

People following the project are probally asking, what is happening, is it still alive? The answer for the second question is yes, and for the first one, a long one.

First of all, I need to tell how the porting to C++ is going. Most of the basic engine code (colision, players, npcs, sound, graphics) is already ported and working, but as this code is the oldest one, there are lots of room for improvement, even the already ported code have parts that will need to be rewritten in the future, as the code is ugly, full of hacks and hardcoded parts. It is important to remember that the project was started with a much smaller scope than the current one, so, having a code that was well written for future support was not an important matter – sorry for that. So, because of that, some parts as jump and gravity – that now uses acceleration and speed meaning a much better behavior – were completely redone, and with that, a lot of old and new bugs appeared.

This moves us to where we are now. I am dividing my time between fixing bugs and porting code such as the weapons menu, that by being much newer, are better modularized, and can be ported without any drastic chances, and much faster. I have no idea when the porting will be completed to get the same level of maturity and functionality from version 0.1 RC1, but I hope to create a beta release by the end of this month (november/2011).

Talking about released, another improvement we want, and need to make, is how we build the project for different platforms. Sadly, out prefered development IDE (Qt Creator) still have a very limited support for multiple toolkits, so we are probably going to use Code Blocks IDE for that. This is a must, as compiling in C++ uses much more objects and a single script or makefile is not enough in most cases.

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As vezes o C++ cria alguns problemas chatos. A idéia de uma linguagem com orientação a objetos é que cade peçado (classe/objeto) é uma entidade independente, mas que pode conter outras entidades. O problema começa quando você tem dois tipos de entidades diferentes, como NPCs e Players,q eu tem que fazer cálculos levando em conta a outra entidade, que ela no conhece. No caso do Rockbot, a classe game, possui duas listas, uma de players e outra de npcs, e cada uma destas, contém uma lista de projéteis, o problema é que cada elemento da lista precisa acessar a lista do outro tipo de elemento, para fazer verificações de colisão e proximidade. Vou ter que pensar muito bem em uma solução.

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