So, after the layoff after pyweek stretched a bit longer than originally planned, we've started to work on Fox Assault again.
There have been a few tweaks to game balance and some significant reworking of the codebase to eliminate some of the more glaring awkward bits of it, which all seems like a good time to start destabilising things by adding new features.
So, as of last night, Fox Assault supports basic levels. A large number of parameters are now configurable, although more need to be converted to be defined by the level, and, obviously, different maps for a level are supported. Levels currently need to be specified obn the command line - a nice level loading screen is still in the pipeline, but propbably won'te be finished until closer to the deadline.

Over the weekend, we arranged a concerted hacking effort on Fox Assault. We made a significant dent in the features we wanted for the final pyggy entry, which is just as well, considering the deadline is less than a week away.

Significant features we added over the weekend include:

• Saving & Loading Games
• A level choosing screen
• Preferences support (useful for testing the game at work)
• Reworked the toolbar to have sub-menus, so we no longer need to worry about the space limitations there
• More goodies for the chickens (Sniper rifles, axes)
• Major changes to the in game economy.
  • Buildings now require wood
  • Chopping trees now requires chickens with axes
• Guns have limited ammunition
• line of sight support for chickens

There are few important features to finish up during the week, such as improving the chicken management interface, rewriting the help to reflect the changed game and making the fox move logic less fragile, but this should all be doable. Hopefully we'll also find some time to address game balance.

Following our plan to ensure that we always had lots of time to spare, we successfully uploaded our final entry with fully seven minutes to spare.

The last week saw some solid work:

• Save games were throughly cleaned up
• The fox move logic was much improved and simplified.
• Several awkward bugs where fixed
• Support for selecting multiple chickens was added.
• Selection sets can be saved and recalled later (useful for re-equipping chickens)
• A number of improvements were made to the gui. These include
  • icons for all the counters
  • reducing the space used by the icons
  • the interaction between tools and large selections of chickens was improved
  • The various dialogs were made much prettier
• help was extensively rewritten, and a controls dialog added to the game
• Several game balance tweaks
• Warn on some dangerous actions
• And other stuff I'm too lazy to dig out of the svn logs at the moment

Unfortunately, do to an ill-timed upgrade to Snow Leopard by our Mac developer, we were unable to create dmg packages this time, but we were able to ensure that the Unix tarball works fine.

I finally managed to set up all the necessary bits to make a clean Mac build of Operation Fox Assault. Since it's past the deadline and I can't upload it as usual, here are the external links for all three versions:

• foxassault-1.5.0.dmg -- Mac OS package
• foxassault-1.5.0.zip -- Windows package
• foxassault-1.5.0.tgz -- Linux/source package

All of these are available at our shiny new website: http://foxassault.org

(It should be noted that all three builds are identical to the final release versions, although the .dmg was packaged more recently. You could use them for judging purposes if you want to, but you should probably stick with the official pyggy uploads.)

--J