Week 79: Snap, boom!

An animated GIF of a recording from Meteor Power showing the new wire-snap animations, new wire spark particle effects, and new meteor-explosion effects.
Power-lines snapping animations, power-line-spark particles, and meteor-explosion particles!


tl;dr: Last week was a short week for me, but I did add some new animations and particle effects for power-lines snapping and meteors exploding.


What happened last week?

Highlights

  • It was a short 3-day week for me.
  • I did a lot of blue-screen-of-death debugging.
  • I added new animations and particle effects for power-lines snapping and meteors exploding.

Laundry list

  • Add new animations and particle effects:
    • Add a snapping animation when power-lines are destroyed.
    • Add support for configuring whether each end of a snapped power-line should drift or be fixed in-place.
    • Add particle effects for power-line sparks and meteor explosions.
    • Fix particle scales and start frames.
  • Miscellaneous:
    • Disable build-station commands when there is already a command queued for building a station at that site.
    • Hook-up the barrier-bot character.
    • Increase trajectory expected-frame-count-deviation tolerance.
    • Update level-end condition to be when the command-center runs out of health, and deactivate the command-center shield when running out of energy.
    • Fix a rare bug where wall-grab and wall-touch directions could be inconsistent.
    • Update constructor-bots to be built from the command-center without needing another bot to be present to build them.
    • Add support for configuring specific types of bots to only be able to handle certain types of commands.
    • Update power-line collision geometry to use multiple sub-segments, which more accurately represent the wire's curve, rather than a single straight segment from start to end.
    • Update runtime edge-trajectory validation to not fail when a collision is detected one frame later at runtime.
  • Blue-screen-of-death debugging:
    • I spent most of my time trying to debug the cause of the non-deterministic blue-screen-of-death crash on my PC.
    • :( Sadly, I still haven't found the culprit!
    • It seems like it must be due to a faulty piece of hardware.
    • I factory-reset Windows, and the issue still occurs, so it doesn't seem to be software-related.

What's next?

  • Add better support for configuring where and when meteors spawn.
  • Add the barrier-bot barrier-building mechanic.


🎉 Cheers!


This is a simple icon representing my sabbatical.

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