Categories
Uncategorized

People!

Last night, we discovered that 50-odd people made accounts on this site.

That’s weird.

Aside from the NSA and people who my parents know but I was too young to remember, I didn’t think there was anyone who I didn’t know, but who knew about me.

That means that I actually have to start putting real, quality content here.  For the first time, I have a responsibility to real people.

<tangent>

Huh.  People talk about social interactions between people over the internet as impersonal.  As far as my responsibilities to other people go, though, the ones in school or within the family seem very self-contained compared to this.  Sure, I have to do homework, but only because one person told me to, and college people judge me based on how well I do it.  But now I’m responsible to a few people who I don’t even know, or don’t even have a guess about.  These people are more “real” to me because they are outside of the pre-determined track that is education.  My existence is affecting “real” people, in the “real” world, however small that group is.

<\tangent>

I’m probably going to make posts more frequently from now on.  I’ll think of something to talk about.  Surely.

Oh, and one more thing.  I forgot to say this in the Electric RC post:  UNINSTALL BETA II FIRST!  Things will break otherwise.  Also, the settings file will behave weird on most computers (all of them that I tried), so I recommend going into the settings and fixing up the new stuff before you play.  The music volume will be off, and the new controller inputs will all be assigned to “Button 0,” which doesn’t exist.  Also, clicking “Restore to defaults” causes a crash.  The best course of action is probably to delete the settings file after you install RC and run it the first time.  That should take care of it.  If it doesn’t, tell me, because that’s not supposed to happen.

Categories
Uncategorized

Electric RC

Most of this happened over Fall break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas break.

RC is out, and it’s different.

  • Main menu and Options menu have cool new background, plus the text is less ugly
  • Other menus, the HUD, and the market have a brushed steel background
  • Added a random forest in the battlefield and a river*
  • Added menu and game music
  • And thus music volume controls
  • Added more functionality to controllers other than the mouse & keyboard (controllers can now toggle weapons and mods)
  • added the cruise missile – very powerful and has a blast radius, but very expensive too.  Also, it doesn’t require a direct hit, it just blows up once it reaches the closest point to its target along its trajectory.
  • removed BVR scope – suffered from uselessness and a huge bug that would have been very difficult to fix
  • replaced it with flares – confuse incoming missiles, but aren’t guaranteed to work
  • with “really good” AI, other planes can use the market (with limited selection)
  • AI planes will only fire primary weapons when within a radius of the distance between your plane and the left edge of your screen
  • Added those wing tip trails (fancy graphics only – sorry, netbook people.)
  • Boosters last 3 seconds
  • Boosters and flares are stackable
  • Speed now reads in mph (the plane’s top speed is 645.5 mph)
Categories
Uncategorized

Good news

Ever since I added support for game controllers, Electric has had horrible frame rate problems; on the Asus Transformer I’ve been using, I have been consistently getting frame rates below 20 frames per second.  WELL.  Earlier tonight I fixed the problem!  I had been trying different things to optimize it for months* with little impact before I finally figured it out.  It was trying to load the controller every frame, even though it was already loaded before the game starts.  I made a goof when trying to optimize controller inputs.  I deleted the erroneous line, and all is well.

RC1 will be out soon (Valve time – trends suggest that school causes a dramatic decrease in productivity).

*Months of school time is more like weeks/2 of summer time.

Categories
Uncategorized

Electric Beta II and Electric Pre-Alpha

School started last week, so production is going down.

Now that we’ve gotten my supremely optimistic into out of the way, let’s cut to Beta II.

For me, it’s been a while;  Beta II has been finished for three or four weeks, but the downloads page was only finished a few days ago, and Beta II appeared on it yesterday.  So, I’ll have to remember everything that was in Beta II but not in RC.

Categories
Uncategorized

We’re Back, for Real This Time

Welcome back to CWG.  We’re new, improved, and less likely to crash every couple of weeks.

We’re still trying to get everything straight with our new server and getting files off of the old one.  Also, we cannot get all the old posts off of the old server, and we are having to rebuild the site.

If you don’t know what happened,  our old server crashed while applying big updates, and a whole bunch of stuff got corrupted.  Things should be back to normal as soon as we recover everything we can.

In other news, Electric Beta II is ready to come out once the Downloads page exists properly.  It’s really cool.  I’m not going to write the whole change log just yet, but here’s a hint:  the Options menu got a whole lot more exciting.

Stay tuned, there’s more breaking news here to come.