So Many Emails So Little Time

I finally found the fortitude to ignore my inbox for five minutes and get the Rag-doll coding started. Spent most of the day on it in fact and had a hoot. I had the advantage of an existing ragdoll system powered by Bullet that was kindly licensed to us for this very purpose and I am making good progress. Right now I have my very small prototype loading in the character, turning it into a ragdoll and having it pinned to a distant wall for pure fun.  

The next step is to move the Bullet specific code over to my own Bullet wrapper and start an integratable prototype so it links in with the existing physics system and engine data structures. Should take another half day and then I will be able to see ragdoll in the engine itself.

The standalone menu system is also finished for our first version with all the graphics integrated and interface working fine. Nice big images which can be changed if you want menu and buttons of your own. No UI to edit this, just swap in your own files but we will make a title menu maker somewhere down the road when the community vote for it.

In other progresses, we now have some enemy voices in the engine which means when the enemies see you they yell out.  It's pretty cool at first, but as Ravey comments on it can get a bit repetitive and annoying, so there is definitely a subtle art when to trigger these audio incidents.

In weapon land, we have just finished the draft of the whole new weapon system and how the FLAK/PROJECTILE stuff fits into it, and today a prototype has been started which turns this from design to code.

While the rocket mechanism is being added, our artist is providing the animation to the meanie that will be firing them in the game.  Rick thinks his rocket is too big, what do you think?  How big are rocket launchers these days?  It's been a while...