I figure it must be a good sign that the map editor is coming together so easily. Either I'm actually learning something about writing flexible and extensible code, or I've just spent so many hundreds (thousands?) of hours on the game at this point that all of the quirks are so deeply burned into my subconscious that I don't have problems with them anymore. Six of one, half a dozen of the other really, then.:-)

Despite my complete lack of effort in promoting Coldest so far (I'm not really to that point yet), this site seems to have made it onto the first page of Google's results for "mech combat game" and I've had to ban my first spammers from the forum. Thank you Drupal SEO plugins.:-)

I'm not entirely sure why I keep writing these things since nobody can possibly be reading them right now, but here's an update on the latest changes in Coldest anyway.

The biggest change is that Coldest finally has basic sounds. There's background music from Derek Audette (to which I have made some minor edits which need to be cleared with him), and sound effects for most of the weapons (I haven't been able to find a good free rocket launcher sound - if you know of one please let me know).

Well, Coldest has its own server now. Things were a little rough at first because the VPS that I got for it is perhaps a little underpowered (my old P4 1.6 laptop smokes it in benchmarks), but it's cheap and it gives me a solid (knock on wood) network connection for serving rather than using my not-100% reliable home connection for it. Since I installed the APC PHP extension the site works acceptably fast for me now, so we'll see how it scales (or if it even needs to).

That's a lot of hours of my life that I'll never get back. Given that I'm still kind of pissed off about it I'll save the recriminations for later (suffice it to say that I'm glad I didn't try to go with MinGW in the first place - ancient msvcrt dlls do not play nicely with Coldest). About the only good thing that came of this was that I cleaned up some potential threading problems and got rid of some previously uncaught errors in the code (due to concept checks in STLPort and GCC 4.3) in my attempts to stop the MinGW build from crashing.

So I've been wondering for a while why the Windows build was extremely slow at some things, and since adding proper grass to some of the maps, loading on Windows became an interminable process so something needed to be done. I googled a bit, and what did I find? This. For those of you who didn't immediately click on that link and read it, the short version is that Microsoft's STL implementation in Visual C++ blows. Hard.

Yeah, I watched He-Man when I was a kid. And I totally had a crush on She-Ra. I mean, her name was Princess Adora so how could I not? :-)

But I digress. The sole purpose of this post is to announce that Coldest now has a master server, although because it's on the same network as the rest of my PC's it won't work for servers that I'm running. It means that any servers being run elsewhere should show up in the server list, which I think is pretty important since it removes the necessity of organizing games ahead of time (somewhat at least).

Development is going well and if I'm lucky I'll have something playable for Mega LAN XXI. I had an interesting experience while attempting to enable keyboard repeat for GUI widgets though, and I thought for the sake of maybe saving someone else some aggravation I would post about it here.

Keyboard repeat in SDL appears very simple. Just call SDL_EnableKeyRepeat(SDL_DEFAULT_REPEAT_DELAY, SDL_DEFAULT_REPEAT_INTERVAL); and voila, you should get SDL_Events as long as you hold down a key. Unfortunately it wasn't working for me.

Welcome to the birth of the new Coldest web site. There isn't much here yet because, while the game is coming along nicely, there are still some major gameplay decisions to be made. Until those have been made the game information is going to have to remain a bit sketchy. However, I should be posting some early screens soon, most of which were taken because of interesting bugs.:-)

Stay tuned as we're getting pretty close to an early alpha release. It may have some placeholder graphics, but it should be enough to give you an idea of what Coldest is all about.