This is the weekly devlog !
This update is going to be a bit shorter than usual as a the main addition can be summed in two word: Sound Effects ! Yes, the game can support sounds now. As a result a fair bit of the week has been spent locating decent public domain sound effects for weapons, explosions and such. But no worries, there’s also quite a few other interesting additions that will be explained in this article.
Enjoy 🙂
Hi, first of all, sorry for the slight delay with this development log.
Anyway, this week focused on adding some gameplay features with new lucrative jobs for both the player and the NPC ships thanks to the introduction of passengers. I also greatly improved the sector map usefulness, added a screen with the statistics of the the various factions over time, added new AI for ships, and many other improvements that will be detailed in this article.
Enjoy 🙂
Hi there ! Devlog time !
First of all, sorry for the weird rotating bullets in the previous release, it’s caused by the rotating warpgates code added a bit in a hurry. I am not going to publish a fix just for that graphical glitch even if it’s fixed by now, making a new release takes roughly a full day and given the current circumstances (which aren’t going any better), I’d rather spend my free time coding toward the next version which will be labelled as Beta 1. Yes, the official beta version is on it’s way, and that’s what we’re going to discuss here.
This release mainly focuses on the Ease of Use. While not as massive as the previous release, it still has quite a few improvements worth checking. It is also a more “professional” release with most of the small bugs and annoyances fixed. The only reported issue I wasn’t able to fix in time is that the game will be extremely sluggish if you have, for a reason or another, disabled Windows’ “Themes” service. As usual, the article will explain the improvements into more details but here are the main points:
Download the Alpha – Updated Documentation – Full Changelog
For those who don’t know about it, GRA was my previous project, a GTA themed rogue-like taking place in a fully simulated (and procedurally generated) city. It featured several thousands of persistent NPC, destructible terrain, several starting scenarios (including zombie invasion), a localized damage system and a powerful game editor. On the other hand it was rather aimless, very buggy and didn’t have a proper save-game support.
I am often asked about Grand Rogue Auto, and I recently reviewed the code to see what’s salvageable and what’s not, so I guess that I might as well explain here what are my future plans regarding this game and while at it do a small post-mortem analysis. This is a long post, and some parts have been written quite a while ago.
As explained previously, some devlog are going to be shorter than usual, this is one of them.
I spent some time fleshing out the pirates a bit. Pirate bases can spawn in territory owned by other factions. I added a “Kill this pirate base” mission type, available at trading stations and military bases that have such a base in a 2 sector radius. Pirate raiders can use their jumpdrive to escape trouble, they will also repair at a nearby base when needed. There’s still much work to do but it’s a start. I also began improving the sector map a bit. Selecting ships/docks will display their health and name the same way the normal view does. The aspect ratio issue of background object has been resolved too. There’s quite a few changes, fixes and improvements to the user interface as well.
There’s also a few bug-fixes. The only one that’s left is the performance issue when Window’s Themes service is disabled. As suspected it’s a limitation of the graphical library I am using. I think I can fix it nonetheless, but It will take some experimenting.
The rest of the article will list the changes in a bullet point format. Hopefully, next update post will be more fleshed out.
Devlog time !
When programmers say that the last 10% of a task tend to take 90% of the time, they are not kidding. One big exception aside, this week’s changes are mostly details, some big, some small, but all needed in a way or another.
I divided my free time between improving the user interface, adding the ability to customize your faction (as quickly explained last week), fixing a few limitations of the rendering system and further balancing the in-game weapons.
On a side note, I also fought against a massive spam bot invasion on most parts of the website. It’s under control now, but it is fairly unusual to see such stubbornness from a single spammer (as far as I can tell) against a fairly low traffic website like mine.
As usual, the full article will explain those improvements into details. Enjoy !