Updates and Elevators

Some unfortunate people have to put up with spam about Elevation from me, so I figured I'd share an update here while I'm uploading the latest build.

Greetings Spammees!

Here's the latest and greatest of Elevation.

Lots of stuff in this release. The big ones are:
- Externalised UI definitions... you don't really care about that, but it makes my life much easier :)
- Changed the score mechanism. Instead of an average, the score is now the aggregate of satisfactions.
- Count down, constant spawning of new passengers, score updates, game over dialog... it's almost a real game.
- State machine for passengers - let's me do lots of little things like delay satisfaction updates for a second or two, fade ins and fade outs
- Fixed heaps of memory leaks. There's still some lingering around but, I think they're because of some weird C++ism to do with statics that I don't understand since they seem to be in the PopCap framework.

Coming up in iteration 5:
- Combos! Por Fin! Bonus points for delivering 3 or more people to the same floor or to consecutive floors.
- Some special effects stuff
- Other little graphical niceties
- Less stupid, as oppossed to smarter, AI

Things are going great with Elevation at the moment. I'm not ashamed to say C++ and I haven't in the past been the best of friends, but this time around everything seems to have clicked (it only took 12 years) and I'm not having any problems with the language. I'm doing a couple of things differently, like forward declarations for everything unless I really need the class definition in another header file, and it's working great.

One thing that is a little annoying is VisualStudio 2005. After using Eclipse it's pretty hard to look at another editor without moaning, unless it's vi :) They just got so many things right with Eclipse 3. From "camel case" sensitive word skipping to highlighting all instances of the current variable name, and it's fast. There's a stack of tiny features which I daydream about while waiting for VisualStudio's Intellisense database to update. I know there are guys in the dev studio team at Microsoft that play with Eclipse, so please please please put these features in an upcoming release.

The last iteration took about a month on account of ending my holiday, spending some time in Colombia with Aura and getting back into the swing of things here in Sydney. I'm still having a hard time staying awake and am plagued by headaches, but I think I should be able to get the next iteration done in a week.

As I said above, the main feature this iteration is combos, which I'm excited about. Basically you get bonus points for delivering multiple people to the same floor or to consecutive floors. Having a little delay between when people appear and when you can pick them up should let you plan combo runs a little, which is where the real points (and skill) to the game will come in. They should allow for some fun game play, after that it's "special" passengers that do everything from give bonus points to jam the other elevators.

Oh and I had a tiny play with XNA last night. I had a model exported from 3D Studio and rendering in my app in about 3 minutes thanks to the Content Pipeline. It was great! I can't wait to sink my teeth into XNA with the next game.