What does that mean? Well, it means that we are no longer obligated to work on Sidus Bellum. What it doesn’t mean is that Sidus Bellum is done and over with. We would still like to finish the game and release it for XBox Indie Games. However, development will now be a hobby and not a school assignment. For us, this is good news. We enjoy working on the game, but the strict milestone scheduling has been tough on our motivation. Now, we will be able to work on the features that we want to work on. And when we come across issues, we can handle them correctly, even if it means redoing entire portions of the code. Previously, we would hack something together to get it working in time for the deadlines.

Anyways, here are the updates that came with this milestone:

We have some game play elements added to the game. Objects have things like hitpoints and energy values and some of their actions are governed by these values. Objects are no longer “one shot, one kill.” Because of that, we also had to in better collision response, so that objects that run into other objects, but aren’t destroyed, will bounce off in a more realistic manner.

We have more than one projectile model. There is an improved version of the laser model that we have been using the entire time; a ball type projectile model was added; and our personal favorite, the lightning shuriken was added. The shurikens are hard to see, at the moment, due to them not having a glow effect like the other projectiles. I plan to add a glow effect to them later, which will look more akin to lightning.

A few new level types were implemented for the game. We have quite a few levels designed, but not all the functionality is in the game to make them a reality. There should be a good variety of game play options for the average player, though.

Some data saving and loading code has been added to allow users to change settings in the game and have the game remember them the next time they play. I wish that I had implemented this a while ago, since I am the only member of our team that likes to have the y-axis control inverted.

Finally, we had to create a teaser video to show off our game similar to how it might be advertised in a commercial. So, for eye candy this time, I have two videos for everyone. They are the same video, just with different sound tracks. They don’t show off anything new from the previously shown videos, except that ships will live longer and the UI is a bit more active, since we are now tracking hitpoints and the like.

Video 1:

Video 2:

First is the XML content control. We wanted the ability to design levels with XML scripts, instead of hard coding the levels into the game code. So, I’ve been working hard on abstracting all of the elements of every game object and combining them into a single object definition that can be filled in with serialized XML data. It is nearly complete, but enough is working to move on at this point.

Next was a complete overhaul of the collision detection system. The previous loose octree structure that we were using was starting to become a performance drain when large scale collision sweeps were needed (like the ones that I needed to do for the AI). The tree was just being made too deep and the game would spend too much time traversing the tree instead of performing checks. So, I tried implementing a few different systems. I have finally settled on a grid system that seems to be working well enough.

Our artist did get some new textures done and I did have some time to add some specular highlighting to the lighting model… so of course, we have a new eye candy video. Enjoy: