As promised, I’ve just uploaded the latest work-in-progress, so feel free to try it out. Get it here.

The main addition in this release is the Special Maneuver feature I talked about earlier.

When the Special Maneuver control is pressed, the  plane will perform a move appropriate to the direction it was flying.  Currently these moves are either a vertical loop (climbing or diving), or a horizontal bank & turn.  Very handy for avoiding mid-air collisions, or when trying to shake the foe off your six!  It’s a lot of fun when you get the hang of it.  The game play is a lot more dynamic, and 3D feeling now.  Especially fun with the 2 player multiplayer (the computer opponent has a very small brain).

I’m very happy with the new feature.  As often seems to be the case, it was a lot more complicated to implement than I ever imagined.  It exposed a lot of my “smoke ‘n mirrors” techniques, so I had to revisit quite a bit of the core code.  For the better I think, and I certainly learnt a lot.

The biggest problem is now in my skybox implementation.  So as to not expose its flaws too much,  the planes can occasionally leave the visible screen, but will bounce back eventually.  I’ll be working on resolving that next, but I thought it was worth releasing anyway.

Hope you enjoy it.  Your feedback is always welcome.  I highly recommend XBOX 360 (for Windows) controllers to play this  However keyboard is still supported, albeit a bit cramped with 2 players.

Get the new version from the Latest Build page here.

Update: Note that this release requires the latest version of the XNA framework recently released. (v1.0 “Refresh”). You can get that here

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 7:40 am and is filed under Game Development, Gaming, PC Gaming, XNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.