Today's blog entry is going to be 80% about Game Maker, and my current project. So if you're not in the mood…leave now.

But before we get into that good stuff, I have to say I'm pissed at 1and1. I just paid an assload of money for hosting with them, and they've so far not shown to be very helpful. Sure, they gave me all the hosting space I'll ever need, and bandwidth out my ass, but their PHP and MySQL support is horrible. Just take a look: <a href="http://www.takedowntheband.com">http://www.takedowntheband.com</a>. Everything worked perfectly when I coded it on my localhost, but now that I've uploaded it their MySQL tables are being retarded as hell. ARG!

So while I was waiting for a reply from them (I was sick today and home from school), I thought it'd be fun to work on TOPDOWN some more.

The main two things we're working on right now are artificial intelligence and graphical effects (namely blood and gore). Physics are too hard to work on, and plus that's Mouser's field of study anyways.

So the first thing I did was make pickup items, like medpacks and batteries (for your armor…idk how that one works out but oh well). Then I thought to myself, "what if AI enemies could pick up items too?" So I made a half-baked system that makes the bot run for the nearest medpack if his health is below 25%. It's pretty awesome, but it doesn't work half the time, and it's going to be redone once we get our new pathfinding system in anyways.

The other major addition of today for TOPDOWN is that I finally reimplemented gibs. And they're exactly how I imagined them to be, now that they have physics. Here's a screenshot for the curious:

<img src="http://64digits.com/users/takua108/td_gibs.png">

Although a screenshot doesn't really do justice to the awesomeness I created, I probably won't upload a new version unless (for whatever reason) everyone wants to try it. Otherwise I'll just wait until the next major release to show it off.

And yeah, those gib graphics kind of suck, but don't most of the graphics in TOPDOWN? After all, it <i>is</i> an engine, not a game…

Well, it's 5:46 AM right now, and I'm freaking tired. I've been sick for the past week or so with allergies (see last entry), but today I missed school because of them. It's that bad. So I'ma gonna go to bed for an hour before school starts, if indeed I do to school today. My parents are almost to the point of forcing me to go to school, regardless of my health. I'm freaking sick of it…literally.

[EDIT.1] That fullsize screenshot was sickening me. I fixed it.