Ah, isn’t it a nice time of the year? The trees shed their leaves, people start to dress up, and Summer gets one hell of a beating from the butler of Winter. It’s the perfect time to get work done.
I’m sad to disappoint anybody hoping for some nice autumnal pictures, but if you’re on this website you probably already know we don’t deal in that kind of stuff. Our pixels show something else entirely. Something like this:
Alien Invasion September Snapshot
That’s the overlay which is visible when choosing a location where to build a new Bunker. The frontal landscape items are covered with a green/red alpha-gradient. So what’s its story?
If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the gradient isn’t exactly identical. I made two black marks where the landscape items are joined together. As you can see, the one on the right is a bit darker.
After about an hour of digging through the code and tearing my (currently very short) hair off, I fixed it:
Alien Invasion September Snapshot
So what happened? Well, that’s what you get for not using exact values for Pi ::- D. For some reason, about 11 months ago, I used 1.55 for the rotation angle of that gradient. I meant a 90 degrees rotation, so that’s Pi / 2 radians. As soon as I used Math.Pi / 2, the situation rectified itself. Turns out, even 0.02 degrees meant a really big offset in the gradient’s aspect, so, there you have it ::- ).
As for why I’m talking in radians instead of plain’ol’ degrees? That’s because the Flash Developers, in all their inconsistency, use Radians for the createGradientBox function, but normal degrees for DisplayObjects.
And now that this is out of the way, let me proudly announce that the new art which Alex cooked up in the past months is finally in place! Here it is, in all its awesomeness:
Alien Invasion September Snapshot
New Landscape graphics, actual graphics for Weapon Upgrades (instead of dumb lines) aaaaand… ruins of the past battles litter the hills in the background:
Alien Invasion September Snapshot
In order to make all this work, I completely rewritten the shadow system for Bunkers, made major modifications to the Landscape Generator, created new routines to randomly place objects and the list could go on.
So, now, Alien Invasion is officially back on track, as I promised it will. There is still the issue of funds, of which we are really short of. It will be especially hard in the sound department, unless we can secure some funding. But I’ll talk about that some other time KickStarter.
*grin*
