Thanks to everyone for the very warm welcome! Having been a part of many online communities, I've rarely received such a kind welcome before. My neverending gratitude.

Well. Let's start off by saying I only opened my mouth so I could put my foot in it.

The "glitchless" game of mine simply needed one or two more times of quadruple checking for me to discover an error.

My intelligent and clever idea of implementing a GRAW-like "Crosscom" system has only proved to provide errors.

Before I start, I should mention that this topdown shooter includes a function where you can rotate the view with the Q and E keys. Got it? Good.

If I rotate the view, the crosshairs rotate with it. So I set a code in the rotating function so that it'd rotate the crosshairs image angle with it, in order to ensure that the crosshairs are always at the correct rotation. This works all very well until we get to the crosscom. If I put the mouse inside the crosscom view, the mouse is no longer rotated correctly.

There was also a problem that if I put the mouse inside the view, the crosshair would jump to where the view was focused on. There were quite a few problems that draw functions and step events didn't fix.

Hilariously, however, while I was writing this blog (if you look closely the past/present tense changes), an idea of deactivating the player occured to me, so that the player wasn't able to move or use the mouse as long as the crosscom view was up. An instance_deactivate_object function provided its own problems and then I realised it would be a lot easier if I just changed the instance of the player to, for instance, obj_player_inactive. The sprite of the inactive object would stop moving and crouch down and stare at the crosscom view inside his helmet. Then if you turned it off, the inactive object would display a standing-up sprite and then change back to the normal player instance. This requires that I fix up the code of the enemies a bit to determine which instance existed, but that's not going to harm anything.

So as the problems are arising I'm fixing them. ..which is pretty much why I haven't got all the core functions up and running yet, I'm still debugging ;)

Oh yeah. Here's a screenshot that Graydon asked for: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v481/SplinterCell_37/Screenshotofbuild3.jpg

So if you haven't understood from the last weblog, you can now visually see that it's very muchly only the third build. ;)

The blue character is the player. The red enemy with crosses over him is dead. The other guy is following a path, with the crosscom in the top-left centred on him.

Speaking of which, anyone know how to draw a border around a view? Or should I just draw a border sprite in the obj_player_inactive creation event?

I plan to be using the GameCave effects engine for the final game, by the way. Which is awesome.

(Is my banner a violation of any rules? I tried reading them but I think I'm just not awake enough.)