We’re a quarter of the way through 2009 already (!) and progress has finally been made on Flyin’ Irons.
Using the instructions from Thierry Brault on the Soya mailing list (which were excellent and only required a few small amendments), today I successfully built Soya 0.14 for Python 2.5, with gcc-4 and pyrex-9.7.2, on Windows.
I then installed and built Flyin Irons using Python 2.5, and was able to play the game on Windows using Soya 0.14 and Python 2.5 for the first time!
It worked remarkably well – it looks “better” in general, the main thing that I noticed first was that text looks much better in this version. Is it me, or is the smoke system looking a bit better too?
Another major change that you might notice in the above screenshot is the grass texture – I have made the colours much brighter and sunnier, perhaps more cartoony, and I think the new look fits in with the style I’m aiming for.
However, there is no sound (a problem that I am attempting to rectify by reinstalling OpenAL), and currently (worryingly!) no collisions, not even with the terrain. Also, it seems that our problems of random crashes (usually when the iron is flying fast, manoeuvring a lot and using thrust) might be back.
The next step is to solve these problems and make Flyin’ Irons work properly. Mark at OpenLander should consider switching to these new versions also – as someone somewhere said, “Python 2.4 is getting long in the tooth”. The possibility of scalable, collideable terrain in Soya 0.14 is something that I plan to take advantage of in Flyin’ Irons – the terrain, while quite beautiful in its rolling detailed smoothness, is just too detailed, and it’s currently too much processing power to just increase the terrainmap size for a bigger level. Scale is the solution here, and upgrading Soya is going to be the only way to fix that.
First thing, though, is to fix those new problems. One step forward and two steps back? Sir Alan’s search for his apprentice continues.
