What a predicament! Hours of fiddling with pixels and colors to get the right combinations, but I managed to make some nice menus and I'm pretty happy with the end-result. In the end I simply resorted to opening textpad and creating everything from there. That brought me back to my Commodore 128 days.. Type code in blind faith and hope you don't run into any pure virtual function calls... yes I did... a lot..:D
Luckily I use a mod-loader program for D3 which I've programmed in .NET which helps me launch maps, the editor, edit textures etc..etc.. I've found that D3 often keeps running in the background because it bombed out while I was working on something and made a typo. The issue is that when that happens you can't start a new instance of Doom, so you have to manually kill the process from Task Manager. Hence I've made my launcher to simply kill any process named Doom3.exe before firing up a new instance, which works pretty well. Yes, it was that much of a pain to create GUIS for Doom3. But somehow my masochistic mind loves every bit of it.
I've also been working more on the fire-propagation system which was, at best pretty cool looking, but at worst pretty buggy. I found I could set things on fire when other things were burning even though I was using a completely different weapon. So I've done some testing there and have some tweaks in mind to fix those issues... yes that's what I get for taking shortcuts, I know.
I've also managed to put a better pain system in place, the actual firedamage that something spreads when it burns ('radiusDamage' to be exact) does very little damage, but burns stuff. I want to give breakables low health, this way the player can still break a barrel with one slash. Breakables that are burning need to hurt the player and monsters, but not other breakables (that much). In other words, I want the fire to spread without breaking other breakables too quickly. So the script now spawns a trigger_hurt that does real damage to the player and monsters that come into contact with it (10 per second). Which means setting things on fire can shield you from attackers, as well as burn you to a crisp if you're not careful.
Last but not least, for your viewing pleasure, a couple of new HDR shots in the media section, note that these are darker than usual, this is an artefact of HDR. And should you have missed it... there's 1080p gameplay footage waiting for you over at youtube and in the videos section!
I have some other 'big' news coming up this weekend so stay tuned!
