Old News
Here are some old project news that don't fit in the homepage, provided for historical purposes.
You might be wondering why there have been no CVS updates recently. That's because I've been working outside CVS to rewrite the Alpha Shooter engine in C++ and definitely improve its overall design for reusability and efficiency -- adding many features and redoing it almost from the ground up. As soon as there's a more or less stable engine code base on which to (re-)build the game, I'm likely to upload it to a new SVN repository on SourceForge and leave the old C code in CVS, optionally updated for bug fixes only (I figured it was time to switch). So, just bear with me for a bit and your patience will be rewarded.
A Gentoo Linux ebuild has been contributed by Roberto Sottile and can be downloaded with the release 0.0.3 files.
Two forums for help requests and general discussion are now active on SourceForge; additionally, it is now possible to subscribe to an announcement mailing list to receive news about Alpha Shooter (currently low traffic).
I've released Alpha Shooter 0.0.3 with some minor bug fixes but including binary packages for all the supported operating systems. This means there is now a Windows installer, a Debian Linux i386 package and a PowerPC Mac OS X DMG disk image. Additionally, the persistent mouse movement mode has been improved to use a dynamic mouse cursor that shows direction and speed of rotation, making it all much more intuitive and useful. Future releases will focus on collision detection and a redesigned object system, but as many things will probably be rewritten at the same time, a new release may take some time to become available. Stay tuned!
Release 0.0.2 is out :) It includes everything that was announced previously, that is to say Windows support, quaternion-based rotations, a revised progressive mouse mode, an auto-leveling feature accessible with the TAB key (the rest of the website has been updated accordingly). Additionally, a debug mode has been added, which will be used more in future releases, and the game has been relicensed under GPL version 3. It's likely that I'll work next on better collision detection and other features, concurrently with the rewriting announced a few days ago.
I know I had promised a new release and I didn't keep my promise, but the development of Alpha Shooter has had to slow down quite a lot for personal reasons. Rest assured it has not stopped and the project has not been abandoned. In fact, I'm actually thinking of rewriting most of it to C++, adding support for Python or Lua modules (probably Lua) and networked multi-player. I don't know yet when such a rewritten release will come, it's likely that the next release will still be C code so that the new features like quaternion rotations and full Windows support can be enjoyed by all before the rewriting goes public. Thank you for staying throughout the delays.
A new release is coming, in the meantime feel free to donate to Alpha Shooter through SourceForge to help development :)
Although time is scarce, I managed to sneak a few improvements in for the next release. The camera now uses quaternions for rotations and can rotate around all three axes, in addition there's a new neat auto-leveling feature and the game can be compiled for CygWin or Windows too (although Windows support is not complete yet).