I dumped my old Irrlicht particle system for a new custom system. I needed some additional flexibility that the previous one couldn't provide, so I took the week to make a new one. Now we've got a nice smoke effect, plus a whole new fire effect! Compared to the previous one the smoke and the fire also rise up, and you can see the smoke getting darker the farther it goes. That's probably not how it would go in real life, but the effect looks nice. 
I bet you didn't know I don't code anything anymore. No sir! All I do is tell her what I want, and she does all the work!
The title says it all, ranged combat is bugging me. To be more precise, backing up bugs me. You see, in Notrium and the current Driftmoon the most efficient way to fight your enemies is to fire at them while running away. That's a surefire strategy, if your enemy doesn't have a ranged weapon he can never get to you, and even if he does he's going to get killed chasing you. In Notrium I didn't see this as a problem, it fit into the atmosphere of running away from alien hordes. But in Driftmoon it just doesn't feel right.
In first person shooters you can always back away and shoot, but it's not a problem there. You move slower backwards and you can't see behind you, so you'll eventually bump into something. In Driftmoon I'm not sure if I can make the player move slower backwards - backwards doesn't really exist since you're looking at the game top-down. I could make the player move slower whenever he starts ranged combat, but moving slower is usually very frustrating in games, and I'd like to avoid it if possible.
One option I can think of is reducing aim when moving, or possibly disallowing reloading when moving. Using a bow or a crossbow you'd have to reload after every shot, so that would count to a lot. What do you think? How can I turn the running away strategy into something that's fun to play?
I've now added the launcher code to all of my games. The most difficult task was adding it to Notrium, since there wasn't exactly a trivial amount of code, and I needed to get it to compile with modern compilers. As a bonus I spotted some minor bugs in Notrium, and I may have caused a couple of others. Please tell me if the new version crashes at any point for you. So here's your chance to fire up your favourite mod again!
Since I've gotten Notrium to finally compile, I might as well ask. Are there any outstanding major bugs that you would like to see fixed to get your mod to work?
I spent the weekend working on a launcher screen for the monkkonen.net games. At first I will put it into my older games to advertise Driftmoon, and in Driftmoon I'm hoping to make it a config utility, mod selector and perhaps an autoupdater.
Anyone care to test whether it works or not? All you need is to download Bikez II and see if it looks like above, and works with your firewall. If you have any additional ideas on what purpose it could serve in Driftmoon, I'm all ears.
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