16 January 2000

The News

It's been a while since the last status report, but that's given me more time to work on the game, which is starting to get dangerously addictive! This has frequently slowed down development; several times I've ended up playing the game for an hour or more rather than actually adding new features! Even so, the following improvements have been added to the game since last month:

• Cars now beep at you if you get in their way. Not only that, but some drivers are more aggressive than others, which effects all aspects of their driving.
• Police cars now have sirens, complete with flashing lights! (With lens flares, of course!)
• I've started to design more of the map - there's a lot more to explore than there was before.
• More scripting features have been added - garages work properly and you get messages sent to you when you do certain things.
• I fixed a rather major bug that allowed cars to drive up walls. D'oh!
• Collisions with 'scenery objects' (trees, lampposts, crates, things like that) now work brilliantly.
• The player no longer restarts in the same place every time, which adds a bit more variety to the gameplay.
• Full multi-language support has been added.
• I added a progress bar to the loading screen.
• The audio system can now cope with up to 500 sounds at once, which is rather more than the previous limit of 100. You might think that this would slow the game down, but improvements in efficiency mean that it's actually slightly faster than the old system!

Anyway, that's it for this time. Look forward to seeing you next update!

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