Day 9: Where is my Easy Button?

Happy New Year!

Project: Space Game (Untitled)
Code Budget: 120 Hours, 56 Spent
Media Budget: 200 Hours, 8 Spent
Day Breakdown: 9 Hours of Code, 1 Media

I honestly figured that developing a particle system was going to be more difficult that it actually was. I used the Authoring Particle Systems Using XML and the Content Pipeline tutorial as my baseline, but I changed up how things worked in order for it to adapt to the flexibility of a game's needs. I added in an option to change the fx script factor, and more importantly I wrapped the entire system inside a manger that handles the individual particle systems. Now when the game goes to add a new particle the manager checks to make sure it is already managing that specific particle system, if it's not that system is created at run time and added to the manager. The advantages of this is the game ends up with a single particle system manager and not a new object that has to be managed in a seperate thread for every effect that will be used on the game (even when not being used).

I went through and added effect data to the following events, which effect to display is loaded by the XML Level file where applicable:

1. Enemy Ship Explosion
2. Bullet Travel Emitters
3. Bullet Collission Explosions
4. Player Explosion
5. Shield Collission
   
6. TODO: Model Tag Emitters
   

Going into today I thought that I was only going to be able to get the system in place and that pretty new screen screen shots of the effects actually playing themselves out in the game was going to have to wait...boy was I wrong! I thought about making a movie, as screen shots are no longer really doing the game justice, but a game really just doesn't feel right without sounds and music. That will be coming tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be able to put together a movie!

Goals for Tomorrow: Sound and Music System!

Shield Being Hit, Notice the Missile's Smoke Trails

General Action With Energy Weapons and Ship Explosions!

More General Action, Looks Like I'm going DOWN!