Ya know, Ogg Vorbis is a pretty spiffy little audio format. Not only does it get comparable (some might argue better) quality and compression than MP3, but it's open-source, royalty-free, and they give you convertors, utilities, and the SDK (software development kit) right there on the site. Not having an amazingly detailed understanding of compression algorithms, I thought before that implementing compressed music into Electris would be hard. But now, in just a day's time, I've put together a whole Class (basically a thing in C++ to hold variables and functions in one big thing) to take care of loading and playing *.Ogg files. It took me some time to get buffering to work perfectly, but I think it's bug-free now. Winamp can play Ogg files, but I thought I'd whip up a better interface for the player I made today to test all this, and stick it up on the site for anyone that might want it to download.

It shouldn't be hard to stick some music into ERF files now, so I guess I better be coming up with some more! And longer this time too I hope. That'll be what I work on next I guess. I'll have it added to version 1.2 of the game.

In other news... It's a shame they didn't do a better job on World's Scariest Police Chases for PSX. It's fun, but seems to have been rushed. It needed a few more features to make it realistic. There's spike strips in the intro movie, but are there any in the game? Of course not. Well aside from that one mission, but they were just there to make you have to drive around the other way. Can you shoot out the baddies tires? No. Can you pit them? Not really. You're pretty much one low-polygon shape cruising along after an even lesser-polygon, and the only way to damage that person is ramming and shooting. Sticking out the window to shoot was a nice touch. Ramming them to death would have gotten old really quick. And I'll give them credit for making the siren have more use than just light and noise. Other cars actually pull to the right for you. But my biggest complaint are those damned LIGHT POLES. I'm sure that if you hit a real light pole, it would bring you to a stop. But when you're flying down the road after a guy, and swirving to avoid the other stupid drivers, with the less-than-speedy response from the controller ... it's not very fun to smack head-on into one and come to a complete stop, while the other guy happily eludes you. Midtown Madness is a perfect example of how a game should be. You can run over pretty much everything except trees. Trees aren't our friends in that game. But it's amusing just to see how many light poles, mail boxes, garbage cans, etc, you can knock over. hehe

But anyway that's enough about that. One day, when I have a 3d video card, I'm going to make my own driving game, just how I like it. But until then, it's 2d for me! (or 3d if I wanna reboot to 98 all the time so I can use my old Voodoo2 accelerator).

I do still have a couple of fun game ideas, both of which can be done in 2d. One though might be better suited for 3d, but I've seen the types of things I want to do done in 2d. It kind of depends on which game I take a notion to develop first. One is a cute-ish platform thing, and that's all I'll say. The other is the new version of Defenders of Zentax. I've got papers and papers worth of ideas, and math (yes, math) for it. I guess when I get the ends tied on Electris, I'll start tinkering around to see which I want to do first. Or maybe sooner... ;)

Oh yeah, and if I'd stop yacking long enough, I might think of the important stuff. I signed up for a new redirector service, so forget abou the zentax.redir.net address. Just go to http://zentax.cjb.net. If for some crazy reason that IT decides to stop working too, there's still the direct link here at zeltar.tripod.com.

posted at 2:46 AM