Weve been quiet recently, but fear not, weve simply been busy getting the next phase of Lost Wing ready to release. The next update includes quite a lot updates, including the full release of the Forest section.
The following will be available soon: All Forest zones, sections and obstacles Zones 1, 2 and 3 are all feature complete with regards to their sections and obstacles. Theres some neat stuff in there, and plenty of obstacles that are quite different in nature to the Industrial track. SPIDERS. Forest boss The full implementation of the boss for the Forest zone is in this update. This includes all its attack phases, animations and general mechanics. What is not complete for the boss is the balancing of health/damage values and the timing of the times when the boss is vulnerable to incoming damage. Well be eliciting feedback from players about changes to make to this over time. More performance and graphical improvements. A fairly large change has been made to how the track itself is pieced together at runtime in a (successful) effort to avoid some floating point issues we were experiencing. When a player managed to survive for extended periods of time without crashing, the issue would become somewhat apparent visually. The further you travelled the more likely the environment and ship would start to flicker and look a bit wobbly. This was a result of the floating point math used for storing the positions of objects (and thus their vertices) for rendering purposes not being precise enough . For those of you of a less-technical persuasion, heres a little bit of clarification (massively simplified for the sake of brevity - these arent real number examples!). Floating point numbers are used in computing to store non-whole numbers, i.e. something with numbers after the decimal point. They can store very small numbers (near 0, for example 0.0001) quite well, but their precision becomes much less when dealing with large numbers (so what you intend to be 21496.73321 ends up being 21496.73). In most games this isnt a problem that causes much annoyance, but for Lost Wing where you travel at a high speed, in the same direction, for a lengthy amount of time, these issues become really exaggerated after a while. Now how did we fix this? This is where we turn to... Futurama... for inspiration. Their ship, the Planet Express, doesnt travel anywhere at all, rather, it moves the entire universe around it. The track in Lost Wing is laid down like a train track, each new section bolting on the end of the last, somewhere in the distance. As your ship moves forward, the track behind you is removed, and new track sections are placed up ahead. What we do with our updated system is much the same, with one important addition, the entire environment gets shifted backwards the same amount that the ship moves forwards. The side effect of this is that from the players perspective, everything looks the same as before (as the camera is also moving with the ship and environment) but, crucially, the immediate environment around the ship is really close to 0 (the origin of the world) in terms of object positions etc, so the position of everything you see is super accurate even after seemingly travelling a really long distance. The result? No more wibbly-wobbly-melty objects! Screenshot time What would a teaser update be if it didnt include screenshots of new stuff too? Here we go!