Sorry about missing last week's newsletter. We will do our best to prevent that from happening in the future.
Overall progress has reached 67%.
www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/progress/
From the Programmer
Written by Invisible
Last week I finally completed the sound core! It took me roughly 2 weeks to get it finished, but it was worth it.
The sound core manages an array of sound objects, creating them and deleting them. A sound object creates a sound loader and a sound player. The loader implements the loader interface and the player implements the player interface. This allows me to create different loaders/players without changing the code that uses them. There is current a loader for Riff Wave PCM and Ogg Vorbis files. The correct loader is chosen by trial and error, and is then plugged into the player object. There are currently 2 players, SoundPlayerStatic and SoundPlayerStream. The static player does not stream from the source and attempts to load the entire audio file into memory. The streaming player has a 2 second buffer and streams in blocks of 500ms as they are needed.
Thanks to EDI in the #gamedev IRC channel, I was able to solve a problem with stopping playback on a stream. After the last block of audio data has been read, the player fills the buffer with silence and keeps track of how much silence has been added. Once the amount of silence has become equal to or greater than the size of the buffer, playback is stopped.
Community Spotlight
Written by Lee
There has not been much activity in either the Loradon or Stick Adventures Online forums recently. There has, however, been quite a large number of posts in both the off topic and forum games sections. This shows that although many players are not active within the games, they are highly anticipating the release and updates of both the games and are checking the forum regularly. Having large amounts of posts in the non-game sections of the forum it gives players a reason to regularly check back.
The community gets along well together, and both the Loradon and Stick Adventures Online communities have gotten to know each other better through the use of the off topic section of the forum.
I believe that the community will continue to grow, but I hope it will not fall apart, and people will still be able to socialize with each other without many new people disrupting the threads. This may happen when Loradon 3.0 is released and there are a lot of people in both the game and the forums, but I hope it does not dissuade the players who prefer a smaller community, as it is now, to leave.
Dev Demo Report
Written by Roarman
Sound! Sound is now back in the game. You can hear your attacks and become one with your newfound weapons. It isn't perfect and needs a little tweaking so it isn't so obnoxious. The noise can currently wake you out of a dead sleep if you have your audio set to medium. Even so, it is a great improvement from the nonexistent sound that you had to run through the game with.
NPC attacks have been altered slightly so that they can't chase and hit you at the same time. They needed an attack duration so that the classes that want to hit and run can do so.
New graphics for a melee skill have been put in to further enhance artistic taste. Everything is coming along nicely.
