Hello there!

There happens to be a bunch of AS programmers on the newgrounds forums that every now and then organize an AI programming competition. This can take different shapes, but the point is that every contestant programs his team of bots to fight and then you pitch all the bots against each other.

Wow, this site has seem hibernating a bit over summer as I've been away on vacation and the DevBlog has been on a halt. So here's basically a filling up on the blank pages of the map that is Fickludd's flash making story.

DevBlog: TankGame is still not moving forward, as I've recently come home and well, not yet got down to it. It's a game with awesome potential but me and Markus need to sit down and plan it out, and until that happens I'm probably not gonna touch it.

As development of our tank game is halted for the time being, I've taken on a new project with ColdReaver. It's his baby really, but I'm getting really excited about it as well. Without promising too much, we're talking Double Dragon style movement, fantasy and RPG elements. It might blow your minds into sizzling piles of awe, I don't know.

Alright! Nothing's happened for a long time on the blog, so I decided to show of the projects entire status in a swift demo:

arrows - move
mouse - aim and shoot

As you can see most of the features we need are already working. Development is now down because well Markus is in Norway, and we need to start designing levels and enemies together.

But as you see a lot has happened that I haven't blogged about. And in fact is, I don't know if I want to write about it. The question is: is anyone interested? and in that case, of which part? Let's hear some requests!

The sites been having some issues with the database lately, namely when not logged in as me you would not have access to anything. After a bunch of frustration it's now fixed again.

You notice that it looks different as well? The old layout was having problems with some Firefox versions, so a change was in order. The current design is a lightly modified free layout from drupal.org.

There was also more than 2000 spam topics in the artifission forum. Gah! To tackle this, now you have to be logged in to create topics. No one minds to much I hope =P.

I met up with Markus today, my pal who's doing the graphics for the game. This brought about a good thing and a bad thing:

He showed me the backgrounds he's made for one of the levels, and a bunch of units - and they're awesome! Check out the images! It's such a great feeling when you suddenly have a bunch of awesome custom graphics to smack onto your code. The general feeling is: this is gonna be great. And you haven't even seen half of what we've accomplished yet :D.

If anyone's missed it, the guys at The Behemoth just anounced that they have completed Castle Crashers! Great work guys, now it's just a few months until it hits the XBOX... *sight*

After an interesting topic on the newgrounds forum, on the topic of how to squeze te maximum out of a particle engine in flash, I decided to do a quick test on some speeds in AS3. These kinds of tests have been done before, by many others, but this result actually surprised me quite a bit.

Okay so you've seen and played a minimalistic demo of movement in the game. Now if any of you are familiar with physics API's, you know that making a modell by hand in them can be very daunting. For example adding a simple box to the physics modell can look like this:

It strange and fantastic how small changes can drastically change the behaviour and performance of code.

I was experimenting with some parameters in box2D, because I though the tank was behaving wierdly with the tracks jittering about in a non estetical fashion. It didn't get it any better. I also tried fixing so that the tank would stand still when you didn't press anything by adding revolve joint friction to the wheels. This worked but caused more jitteriness -> not good!