As promised, here’s Sub Commander! Did some final test playing and bug fixes the last days and here it is. I’m pretty satisfied with it. I think it looks quite ok and the gameplay is just what I had in mind. It’s available for download on the Games page. Of course, it’s possible there are still bugs left, so if you find any, feel free to contact me.
So what’s next? While I was working on this game, I also did some work on Wasabi Defense, wich will be resurrected one of the following days. But first I’m finally gonna play some games! I still haven’t finished Bioshock, for crying out loud!

Go to games page

The end is nearing! I have added a battleship to the game. Here’s what it looks like:

The battleship takes a whopping 8 hits to take out. Now that most units are in the game I’m beginning to get a good overview of the difficulty. One thing I’m gonna change is the ammo capacity. Currently the player can carry 12 torpedos but I’m gonna up this to 16.
The only thing left now is adding an aircraft carrier, test playing it and writing some documentation. I’m confident enough now to announce a release date: June 30. Of course, this is by no means a promise but a carefull estimation.

Finally fixed a few very nasty bugs. The menu bug I talked about in my last post, the one that made the game crash, has been fixed. Instead of the sprite-based menu, I decided to give the gui builder another try. It wasn’t easy because this is the most underdocumented part of Torque, but I managed to get it to work, complete with sound effects and automatic centering. The only part that I didn’t get to work for now is resizing it so it always looks the same size, no matter what resolution you use. Getting it to resize can be done automatically, but the problem is switching between aspect ratios. I designed the menu for a standard display, and when you play the game on a widescreen display it gets stretched. I think I can solve this, but it will take me time and a lot of experimenting. Since I think this game has been in development for too long already I decided to keep the menu the way it is and try the resizing thing some other time.

There’s a bug in Sub Commander that gives me headaches like no other, but first another screenshot! The ship you see here is the anti-submarine cruiser, firing a load of anti-sub shells. When they hit the water, they sink down vertically until they hit either the bottom or the player.

But now about the bug. Here’s what happens: when I click the “Start game” button in the main menu, the game crashes nine times out of ten. No error message, it just closes with the notification “Torque Game Builder doesn’t work anymore”. I don’t get the slightest feedback about what’s going wrong. The weirdest thing is, from time to time it works again even if I don’t change anything in the source code! However, if I disable the title screen and go straight to the game (with the exact same code as in the title screen), everything works fine.
So what is the problem? I suspect it has something to do with the way I created the menu buttons. I didn’t use the gui builder because with sprites it’s easier to adjust everything to the screen resolution and aspect ratio. Perhaps there’s some weird bug in the mouse event handling that causes the game to crash, but since I don’t get any feedback this is just a wild guess. I’m gonna try to create the title screen with the gui builder and then make sure it adjust to the screen size and see what happens then.

Added another enemy ship to Sub Commander. This time it’s a mine layer. As the name implies, it drops mines. It’s very fast and hard to hit, but it takes only one hit to take him out. Here’s what it looks like:

The mines it drops sink to a random depth and hover there for a while. Like the depth charges, they have a proximity fuse, so stay far away from them! After a while they slowly sink to the bottom and explode. At first I wanted to make it possible to destroy them with a torpedo, but now I decided not to. I think it would be too easy otherwise, but of course I may change my mind if it turns out to be too challenging.
After this I have three more surface ships planned. First of all an anti-submarine cruiser, wich fires large volleys of small depth charges (this actually existed once), an aircraft carriër and a battleship. Those two won’t drop bombs or shoot at you, but they will be very though and require a lot of hits to sink.