Last hours
Ok a lot happening and slightly less than 5 hours to go. The game itself is about complete. I tried to do sounds, but in XNA (1.0 Refresh) you need to do those with a Microsoft made audio authoring tool called XACT. Well it happens that it doesn’t work in Vista. Nice =). Also had a few “oh s**t” moments. One was where I realized the cannons can be placed to any place, including inside walls or other cannons. So I made a collision system for that (a simple 2D collision system, kinda like the data in the editor). Also when massive damage is done to the landscape, even on my new superfast quad core the frame rate went to seconds per frame. “Time to include multithreading” I thought, and I thought correctly. Now when the landscape is dynamically modified, the game starts calculating it in the background. Only the visual aspect hurts (it comes a bit later, depending on how fast your computer is) as the collisions for the bullets are done using the recent model. All in all looking pretty good. Now I think I’m gonna make some bats to make release packages (as the last minutes are always tough) and then make more levels. I don’t think 6 is enough. =) Here is a screenie with some damage in it:
