Saturday, 30 September 2023

Airship Dragoon Gets An Update

 

Airship Dragoon Update Sept 2023
 

 Airship Dragoon received a rare update this month. This was entirely due to me finally finding a way around using Visual Studio 2013, who's license Microsoft had locked me out of when they retired it a couple of years ago. The solution - the OFFICIAL MICROSOFT solution was  ... to hack the registry to forceably gain access to their own product ...

For more on that escapade, see the Airship Dragoon update on Steam.

Work on Monsters Loot Swag and bringing it up to the new and shiny version of the game engine continues unabated. One thing that the new engine has is a full script checker for compiling which actually looks through the scripts and reports errors - and boy did it find some. Whilst most errors were little more than referencing a wrongly named local variable and thus completely harmless, some were not, especially when trying to call function from the server for objects that did not exist at all.

And so began Monsters Loot Swag; Steam Early Access update 18; "The Big Bug Hunt".

This was quickly followed by the Monsters Loot Swag; Steam Early Access update 19; "The Big Bug Hunt Part 2" which continued to fix numerous minor issues and also got glyphs which are a fancy term for text and symbols, working for Playstation controllers and Steam Deck.

I rolled all the fixes from the new engine version into the previous version uploaded to Steam.

So back to upgrading the game to shiny PBR newness and new fangled asset system. Most of this is now done, with the actual loading/unloading having required some careful following of how the new system works to update, change and port my custom code. Single player campaign is now in and full functional with much fancy shininess to explosions due to the new HDR system. Online multiplayer is really the only thing left to finish off before I upload a full build of the new engine as a Beta Depot on Steam.

October is coming

 Next month is October and I hope to finally have a working beta of the new engine build up and running.