They Do Their Job, He Wants to Sue

Marion Barry was arrested for driving with a suspended license recently. Now he's threatening to sue and has accused the police of racial profiling. My opinion is anyone who drives knowing their license has been suspended and complains due to arrest afterwards is an idiot. He has a past of legal troubles, so I don't think he has a leg to stand on either. You can read about it here.

Objects Function Again

I'm sorry I couldn't get objects working in the anniversary release of ProSonic. I have them working now though. This is one portion of the engine I decided not to rewrite because I felt it was already written well the way it was.



In the picture, you will notice rings show up. They're black because the sprites are still based on drawing methods of the old ProSonic code. I have a custom sprite format planned out, I just haven't coded anything to use it yet.

Also, you'll notice the level in the picture isn't Chemical Plant. I figured people were probably tired of looking at dozens of pictures of the same level, so I used LIMP (also packaged with the anniversary release) to import Dust Hill Zone from the Sonic 2 Delta II ROM hack. I applied heat filters to make it look like it was hot in the level.

Once the code for the new sprite format is in the engine, the next task will be to put a player in the engine. I am thinking I will write this portion from scratch too since it has proven to be a big challenge taking the old code and moving it over into the new engine code.

ProSonic Anniversary Pack

The ProSonic Anniversary Pack is here! It includes a couple goodies (including the ProSonic engine itself), although none which I will provide any actual support for. I don't consider this an "official" release. I have called this a "camera demo" because there's no player activity yet. I did what I could in the short amount of time I offered myself, so I hope some people are happy.

You can click here to download the anniversary pack. A Pentium II processor is the bare-minimum requirement, but I strongly recommend a Pentium 4 processor as it will do a far better job with performance.

ProSonic's New Friend -- AngelScript

I am 75% sure ProSonic will use AngelScript. I don't want to write my own scripting language because it's too much of a hassle, and there are other people who can do a far better job than I ever could. So I think this is a smart decision. It is very close to C/C++ code, and I think it will have the flexibility I need.

I know that as soon as some people read that, they're going to feel disappointed. So let me clarify this again -- you won't have to program or know anything about AngelScript. I will be sure to write software that will work like the popular "event editor" used by Click Team.

I have also been rewriting ProSonic from scratch. I took a break for a few weeks because of college work, but now I'm heavily involved in ProSonic again. On December 15th, I will release a couple of downloads to the public. I can't guarentee it'll be exactly what everyone wants, but I'm doing what I can with the short amount of time I have.

Backgrounds in the new ProSonic engine work flawlessly. This wasn't the case in the old engine due to the methods used to draw the screen. The minimum requirement might be bumped up to a Pentium III processor though. I'm hoping that isn't the case, because I would love to see it run smoothly on my old Pentium II - 400MHz computer.

The new PZF format is complete. I have a PZF compiler that works well too. I have a Chemical Plant PZF file I've been using during tests that's 1.13MB in size. With compression, it can be sized down to under 30KB. I'm excited about the PZF format because of the vast amounts of flexibility it allows. I have an entire library written for the format that is being used in the PZF compiler, as well as the new ProSonic engine.

The future looks bright for ProSonic. Check back for updates, because they're coming just around the corner.

A Little Boy Defends His Family

This is one of the greatest things I've ever read. This is incredibly awesome in my opinion. Please read the article and tell me what your take is on it. I imagine the robbers left the way they did because handling 3 children with one of them being brave probably made them feel uncomfortable. That's the best guess I can come up with.