Hidden Asset (isometric assassination/stealth game)

[oldrocker99]

Hooray! Huzzah! Yippee!

[Christian Knudsen]

As teased in my screenshot for last Saturday's #screenshotsaturday, the big news in the world of Hidden Asset is that the game is no longer in pre-alpha. There are quite a bit of different opinions on what pre-alpha, alpha and beta means in the world of videogames, but here's how I use these terms:

• Pre-alpha: Missing core features and functionality.
• Alpha: Core features and functionality done - missing content.
• Beta: All content done - missing bugfixes and balancing.

So this means that all the core features and functionality of Hidden Asset are done. This is basically all the hardcore programming - a huge milestone! I can now focus almost all my dev time on designing levels, making assets and writing the full script for the game. As a result, the pace of development should also pick up a lot going forwards.

There's just one thing I need to change code-wise before I can leave the heavy coding behind: switching from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2. This shouldn't be that huge of a deal for Hidden Asset, since I only use SDL as a wrapper for OpenGL and for processing sound and inputs, which I believe hasn't changed much from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2. I'm also switching Ascii Sector over to SDL 2, though, which should fix some problems with running that game on Mac OS X. Ascii Sector uses SDL for graphics rendering, which seems to have changed a lot from 1.2 to 2, so that may take up some dev time. We'll see.

When I've switched everything over to SDL 2, I'll build the last of the two introductory tutorial missions for Hidden Asset, and then this alpha version will be ready for closed testing, barring a few bugfixes and polishing. I'll make an announcement when I'm looking for testers.

[oldrocker99]

Your posts have been informative, and show what kind of work goes into game development; many gamers give it no thought, except to whinge about "lousy" developers. This is looking better and better, and, yes, it's an excellent definition of pre-alpha, alpha, and beta.

And your frequent updates are most welcome!

[Christian Knudsen]

Thanks, oldrocker99! Much appreciated!

Migrating from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2 was a lot smoother than I had feared. Though I ran into an issue with the game leaking memory when switching resolutions or between fullscreen/windowed mode. With SDL 1.2, I had to completely destroy the OpenGL context and the SDL window and delete all loaded textures, then create the SDL window with the new settings and reload all the textures. This worked fine with no memory leaks. But for some reason, in SDL 2, this creates a memory leak. It seems that even though I delete the OpenGL textures, the RAM wasn't freed, so whenever I changed the game resolution or switched between fullscreen/window, I could see the memory footprint increase in the Windows task manager. Weird. Using heaptrc in FreePascal also confirmed these memory leaks.

However, it turns out that I don't really need to go through the process of deleting the OpenGL context, SDL window and loaded textures (and then recreating everything) to change window resolution or switch between fullscreen/window in SDL 2, since there are dedicated calls to do this that don't destroy the already created SDL window and OpenGL context (this may also have been possible in SDL 1.2 and I just weren't aware of it). So now all that is a lot simpler and quicker. Nice! I love it when a bug/issue results in a solution that's better than what was used before!

[Christian Knudsen]

Made a mission score screen. Keeping it simple.

[Christian Knudsen]

[Christian Knudsen]

The new melee combat system is now done!

[Christian Knudsen]

[oldrocker99]

Guards! Locked doors! Keep 'em coming!

[Christian Knudsen]

In this video, I start working on the remaining art assets for the second map.