64Digits

7865 views as of copying and pasting this off TigSource

So, I guess this is sort of going to be a log, or the complete lead up to currents events and evolution of AckAck.

AckAck v1.x

Seeing as it was an engine I skipped on graphics, the non-grid aligned black square is you

AckAck originally started out in the Game Maker universe, as a perfect method of performing collisions between objects. I guess the idea right from the start was to compete with Fox-NL's Fox Engine, and to help create clones of Jumper 2. Whenever Fox-NL made a new engine, I'd add support for the same thing in AckAck (thats why it has something as useless as a sniper scope in a platform engine). For a long time there I thought I just sorta lived in his shadow, AckAck never seemed to get more views, he released his Winsock scripts while I gave up, and then his game Cubes Online got accepted into Reflect while mine was denied.

Only game I ever made from v1.x was Karack Spirit, which was fun, I really liked the art style.

Zero graphical effort, just the way I like it

Now, AckAck was just simple at this point, and not all that fast for extreme amounts of collisions at once. Truth is my entire idea for the coding, every single bit that spawned into AckAck came from a lil post YoMamasMama made.

AckAck v2.x

Hah, never reached daylight. But in short terms, it was AckAck v1 on crack, in flash. (I had next to no knowledge of ActionScript, thats why it failed)

AckAck v3.0

This is where things started getting interesting. AckAck v3 was a complete rewrite. Removed all the sprite based collisions, they were just slowing me down. This one now just used maths to compute point-triangle (check if a point is within a triangle) collisions.

Now AckAck lost everything else, it become purely a collision engine. Because GM was too slow to handle the thousands of checks executed every frame, AckAck was turned into a DLL.

I really loved it now, apart from making a collision engine the one other thing I wanted to make is a universal level editor, which could now be done because AckAck didn't use custom made tiles, it now uses triangles! So Ack-Lev was made at the same time.

AckAck v3.0 was never released, as I didn't really have a great enough audience (any GM user would just prefer GMPhysics methought). So the only game ever created using this was Silent Night, a hybrid between GM and C++ that I made to enter the YoYoGames competition. At the very end of the competition I realised it broke one of the main rules (had to be able to be played in a browser, using their crappy program), but it was still fun to develop anyway. The idea was a snow-themed Soldat.

I had an eccentric level designer, not to say that was bad… I just wanna know why he thought to arrange Santa Claus's like a shrub

Yeah, so AckAck v3 was basicly inspired by Soldat, I love Soldat.

One other thing to note is Silent Night is broken, I'll fix it some day but for now I'm just cbf.

AckAck v3.5

The current and best AckAck. By now I got sick of GM, and moved completely into C++ coding with SDL/OpenGL/OpenAL. If v1.x was inspired by Jumper 2, and v3.0 was inspired by Soldat, v3.5 was inspired by Gish. Originally I tried to create reasonable softbody physics in GM, using old AckAck v1.7. Now however I had much more power in C++ to muck around with, I managed to create a fair alright softbody.

At one point I made faces for them and had them singing, I was gonna name the game Silent-Loco-Gish (first is true, second is false)

This was about version 3.2, nice, but it was just Silent Night engine in C++ (as you can see from the Silent Night level above).

[3.3]

Created bezier curves for Ack-Lev, levels looked nicer

Leaned more towards Loco Roco feel.

[3.4]

Removed Softbodies, they were pissing me off.

Added a basic enemy, basic player and camera.

Added embedding into browsers.

Try it, it's a basic sorta introduction to what my engine currently is. Really basic

And, yeah, I used Cave Story sprites, so what, <_< just a test

[3.5]

AckAck now became an entire framework, along with SDL it handles key presses, text drawing, image loading, all that crap.

One thing I'm really proud about is the layer system. The background layer might only move half the speed the real (collidable ground) layer would, and then the foreground would move by twice as fast. Creates a more 3D sorta feel to the game.

It looks alot better in motion, but more on that below

So, thats how AckAck has progressed over the years. Unfortunately I can't release v3.5 just yet, it's far to unstable and truth be told, theres not that much to show. But doesn't it look nice? ^_^