I finally yanked my old DirectSound implementation out...and got OpenAL totally integrated into the game. I now have 3D Surround effects going in the game...it sounds awesome on my new 5.1 speakers. You can spin the camera around and actually hear the sound source moving around the game world...it's awesome. I've still got a little tweaking to do on the sound rolloffs to get it perfect though.



I also fixed some problems with the Options menu in the game, as well as added 3 sound control sliders into the options menu...."Master Volume", "Music Volume", and "Effects Volume" they work quite well.

I also added 3 sliders that let you adjust the "View Distance", "Vehicle Draw Distance", and "Human Draw Distance".

Later tonight I'm going to add drive by shootings, and multiple gangsters per vehicle...and tommorow some new city artwork.

Another issue I'm dealing with lately is the character animations in the game.



I use a low-poly 3D modeler called MilkShape3D to create the art for the game...I load it's native .ms3d file format into my game. It unfortunatly doesn't support multiple bones-per-vertex, and the animations that were created for the game use vertex-weighting...so I had to re-rig (attaching bones->vertices) them myself in Milkshape3D and they came out about 70% as good as the originals...the animations aren't smooth, and the characters are very pointy (not like in the above). I've been dealing with it for a while...you can probably notice it in some of the screenshots I've posted in previous entrys.

I'm still searching for a solution since I don't want to switch file formats this late in development. I could have the animations re-done, re-rigged in MAX, re-rigged by somebody else in MS3D, or any other options...right now I'm just trying to find somebody who is an expert animator in MS3D to give me some advice.

Fortunatly vertex-weighting is a planned feature in Milkshape3D, it's just a matter of time before it gets added.

- Dan