I spent most of yesterday in bed with a splitting headache so that was basically 24+ hours spent out of commission. Mostly finished up the sprite handler classes and put together a quick demo where you can’t do anything. Here’s a brief video of what I got done.

And a screenshot:

What you can’t see:

• Sprites are all handled with a very robust class which handles loading, animation, etc. hands-free
• The sprite manager class wasn’t finished so there was some handcoding to be done for displaying the map, but for the most part the main code is very stripped down and the eventual goal is to just get it down to a spriteManager.render() call in the main loop.
• Another very robust path handling class which supports linear, circular/spiral, and bezier curve types. The plane in the video is following randomly derived quartic bezier curves spliced end to end (hence the sudden change in direction sometimes).
• The map itself is a bunch of layered sprites with transparency where appropriate (although see below)

This is also my first attempt at using Inkscape to make art assets (besides some rudimentary textures used in TubeRacer). With grid snapping it’s pretty easy to make some basic sprites, although edge aliasing was an issue (which I think can be fixed with using 32-bit PNGs and converting those to 32-bit BMP for use with the engine, and/or just adding PNG support to the engine, which I would’ve done if not for the time restriction). With 32-bit image support the engine could also handle things like transparent smoke coming from the factories and not having to worry about aliasing on the edges of sprites (like the plane, where it’s very obvious). Inkscape still has some issues with grid snapping though which made doing some things a pain (like the smokestacks).

All in all if I hadn’t come down with whatever illness hit me on Saturday I would’ve got a lot more done. I’m going to give it another 24 hours of work just to see what I could’ve finished but I won’t be entering.