Monday, October 8, 2012

Project Ginshu - Alpha 26 - Beiged

Alpha 26 of Project Ginshu is now available for players who have preordered the game. This alpha is not available as an update yet, because not all features of Alpha 21 have been ported yet. Alpha 21 remains available as a separate download (Runtime + Update).

Right now, Win32 and Linux builds are available. The OSX build will follow soon.

Changes:

- Ginshu now runs entirely on top of our own pure Python open source game engine Beige, which remains in early alpha stage.
- Mouse navigation should now be much better than it was before, especially on OSX, thanks to true relative mouse movement support.
- The game is now better at recognizing input when the framerate is low.
- OSX: To make development and debugging easier, the game is no longer bundled as an .app file, and should be started through the "ginshu" shell script.

Known Problems:

- Because of the port, some features are still missing, but will be reintroduced in the following weeks, together with new features:
- Missing Feature: building. There is still a ray casting related bug which prevents attaching more than one item to the homeship.
- Missing Feature: enemy physics. Enemies currently don't move correctly and die immediately.
- Missing Feature: 3D sound. Even though we utilize OpenAL, sounds are currently not attached to a location and will always appear to be in the center of the screen.
- Missing Feature: fades. Screens do not fade-in/-out at the moment.
- Missing Feature: hud text. The inventory does not display item quantities. The win/lose text is missing.
- Missing Feature: health bar. The homeships health bar appears to always be at 0%.
- Missing Feature: turret logic. The move-to operator is not correctly implemented. Turrets do not track targets.
- Exiting to the menu and starting the game again currently doesn't work.
- Windows: Because of a bug in PyPy, Ginshu crashes after a random running time between 10 seconds and 2 minutes. Starting pypy with --jit off seems to prevent the crash, but seriously impedes the framerate.
- Linux: On dual monitor setups, the engine may not recognize the screen resolution correctly. Use the ginshu-1280x720 binary or provide your own command line arguments for now.
- Linux: The linux build is for 32-bit systems. Some 64-bit platforms do not provide 32-bit support libraries out of the box. 64-bit Ubuntu e.g. requires the ia32-libs package to be installed (it's in the Ubuntu repository).