5 October 1999

Welcome to the first in a series of short reports keeping you up-to-date on the current development status of Payback. To set the scene, I'll give a quick list of what still needs to be done:

• Sound effects
• Level design
• Bug fixing and extensive playtesting
• Playable demo
• CD cover and manual design

So, to quote The Fast Show (a British comedy show):

This week, I have been mostly...

...working on the routing mechanism. Routing has been tested by getting police cars to chase the player around the map. A series of lookup tables has been used to reduce the runtime CPU overhead to virtually nothing. Works beautifully, although the pursuing cars still need to be taught how to avoid other (slower moving) vehicles! :)

...working on the event scripting. The original plan was to invent a new interpreted scripting language that would be used to describe events in the game. However, as I explored this I quickly realised that the scripting language would be mimicking a lot of the features already implemented in C. Then it hit me - why not use a seperate compiled C program as the script? I implemented this over the weekend and it worked beautifully. This method also has the advantage of taking less processing time than an interpreted approach would have - helping to keep the game up to speed without sacrificing expandability.

Well, that's all for now. See you next update!

For more information about Payback, click here. To find out how to join the Apex Designs' mailing list, have a look here.

When the president does it, that means its not illegal.
Richard Nixon, Former US President