Aphrodite I suppose gifs are popular for short game clips because they're good for showing pixel art without compression artifacts & are a universally compatible format. Plus there's lots of good free tools to make them, as opposed to something like animated pngs. Gifs are crap though <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy">

jobel try https://screentogif.codeplex.com/ - it's as convenient as gifcam with a few more options, & unlike licecap there's a greenscreen optimization thing to reduce filesize.

if the ship is surrounded, at which point it just shoots the asteroid in front of it

Why didn't I think of that? Would solve my pathfinding issue at a stroke.

About your collision shapes - if they're not already, I'd suggest making them rectangular or even triangular quadrants for efficiency.

Ok this is probably not what you're after but it's an idea for very cheap pseudo-pathfinding using chipmunk physics forces to push things along to a target:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/523 ... ng%27.capx

A problem with it is that the drones get stuck in cul-de-sacs. A solution might be to detect when the speed drops below a limit, then enable a "reversing" boolean. When reversing you just move away from the target for a say 5 or 10 secs. After that you set it to false (I'll give this a go if I have time).

As r0j0 said, put your ship & collider into a container so they're picked & created (& destroyed) together. That plus running collision checks every 0.5s or so are essential.

Your various directional bools look dodgy. Because each direction negates the other, you'll be favoring the one that's last in the event order (eg. if obstacles are in front of & behind the ship, thrustBackwards always ends up true). The results in the video look good though

I wonder if you even need 4 colliders per ship. Checking the rear could be eliminated since you're always travelling forwards, so maybe you could just have one big 'sensor' collider in front. On each collision check, you get the angles from each obstacle to the ship (possibly weighted by their size & distance) & work out a new heading for the ship.

Or how about a force-based system with no collision checking: you apply forces away from obstacles based on distance & obstacle radius. Slap on a speed limit (chipmunk can do this) & the physics will never spaz out.

Then you do some cosmetic things to make it look like the ai ships have the same controls as the player.

I think I'll have a go at the heading & force based pathfinding, given me an idea for something of my own...

Interesting addition, I really like the idea of lots of these drones buzzing around in the background. Will they be competing against the player, or background life, or maybe a player-guided swarm?

Lovely audio as always & I prefer these retro vectors to the textured polys. Also I saw your other post about ai optimization - I'll have a think & post some ideas later.

Someone mentioned improved lighting earlier, & it would be interesting to have something as an alternative to shadow caster & the LOS behavior for drawing & detecting 2d visibility like this: http://www.redblobgames.com/articles/visibility/

I'm currently using a single chipmunk physics raycast as a cheap alternative ( https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/523 ... canner.gif ) but some proper polygonal lighting zones would open up a lot of gameplay possibilities.

Had a go in chrome & the same thing happened: i press ctrl-d after walking off the log to pull it right, the new bookmark menu pops up, i fall into the pit while closing that ( ), now the character just walks right without pressing any keys.

I'm using windows 7, & keyboard things like sticky keys are turned off so it can't be that.

Could you make the action key something other than Ctrl? I keep triggering bookmark page when pressing ctrl-d. Another issue I'm having is the character sometimes walks when no keys are pressed, or sometimes movement stops working. These happen after pressing the use key on the log.

Other than that, very nice animation & I'm getting steady 60fps fullscreen in firefox.

spongehammer the only way you can currently do this is by constraining a second invisible non-colliding object to the first, but I also think it'd be handy to manually set CoM. I'm doing a physics platformer & having a lower CoM for the player would help in a few cases. Maybe we shouldn't distract Rojo from his wrapper project though <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

Someone mentioned kinematic objects a couple of pages back, & I've just managed to get a moving platform to work with physics object so here's the results:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/523 ... tform.capx

It's hacky but seems to work. A kinematic object should have infinite mass but this has a very high one (as in hold-down-the-9-key high). The platform has its velocity set directly, so gravity isn't a problem. The other defining characteristic of a kinematic body is i think that touching objects shouldn't be allowed to sleep. This didn't seem to happen so there's no events dealing with that.

& don't laugh at my smooth cornering code.

Laser puzzle test in my grappling hook game:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52354372/lasers.gif

Uses Rojo's sprite sheet plugin (plus his chipmunk physics port) for the scrolling laser textures, which is like tiledBG with offset & scale options:

plugin-sprite-sheet_t90520

Lets Battle 18:00 GMT >0<

I'll try & remember, but if not you could join the chatroom & message me. Some links here:

evidently not me thanks for the tip.

so with webgl off, in my above capx i get 60fps, 40% cpu on all line widths from 1-50