Yeah it’s Monday, I’m a day late… I know! Anyway progress on OpenKatana is going pretty smooth at the moment and we’re doing bits and bobs pretty much everyday. I’d say this month has been the most productive in a long time
Yesterday we gave out our tools and a build of OpenKatana to a very skilled mapper to see what he can come up with as a deathmatch level, it’s certainly very exciting as it’s a chance to see an actual living and breathing level for once! It’ll also be a good chance to get an idea of what kind of tools or details a mapper might want to add to their map. This is also great as it’s going to force me to get my ass in gear about sorting out our in-engine editing tools which I’ll go into more in the future.
While that’s all great we have had at least some problems recently, most namely a horrible problem in FitzQuake which has become pretty clear recently as we’ve made the move to support full-coloured lightmaps and ditched the older standard Quake format, it’s not stopping us from working but it is a large problem which I’ll have to look into at some point.
Over on the game-side of things we’re still rewriting a lot of the game-logic and weapons are pretty much sorted, still need to finish adding them in but we have some problems (and mysteries) solved now. I’ve been mainly working on monsters myself since I have some rather big plans right now but I just haven’t had the time to commit to working on them. Something I recently decided to do, sometime ago, was see if I could work on an entirely new gamemode only making changes to the game module and it went pretty well, It also gave me a chance to fix some very important bugs or mistakes I had made. Last time I had worked on the ctf mode (earlier this week) I had decided to try working with using states for the flags, for example if the player picks the flag up then that flags state will be changed to STATE_PICKEDUP, think, add in the necessary effects and such, then keep on checking we still are being carried, and then upon taking the flag over to the other flag we would change that to STATE_CAPTURED which once again we would then go into our think function and then quickly reset the flags position. Simple concept but its turning out to actually be rather messy… Anyway I’ll let you know how things are coming along next week