20 May 2018 » C-Dogs 0.6.7 Released!

C-Dogs SDL 0.6.7 released! This time we’ve added a secondary weapon system for grenades and explosives, plus there’s some graphical enhancements!

Grenade key

C-Dogs grenades have always been awkward to use: you have to cycle through your weapons, standing still while doing so. What if throwing a grenade was just a single key press?

Well now you can!

This idea isn’t new, although it wasn’t very common back when C-Dogs was first released. Giant Bomb calls it “Automated Grenade Throw”, and says it started with Shadow Warrior, but it was also available possibly earlier with Assault Trooper (1997), or if you want to stretch the definition, Metal Slug (1996), or, um, Taito’s Front Line (1982)???

Now it’s very common, especially in FPS games, and it’s a great design; grenades are really a situational weapon, so to have easy access to it without switching out your current gun is handy. Although it is possibly the biggest gameplay change we’ve made, it’s what C-Dogs SDL is about: making a great retro game even better with modern tech and game design.

To support it, we’ve reduced the number of gun slots to two, and made grenades occupy the third slot.

Although this means you can’t have three guns anymore (or three grenades… I’m sure we’ve all played with this at some point 😈), having two guns makes it easy to switch between them, and one grenade makes the most sense.

We’ve also added a neat grenade counter to the HUD, so you can quickly see how many you have!

Finally we’ve redesigned the way ammo pickups work for grenades. For guns we have gun pickups and ammo pickups, but for grenades, they’re one and the same: if you have the same grenade type, you pick up as ammo, otherwise you can choose to switch out your grenades with the one you are picking up.

Try it out! I think this is a great excuse to replay your favorite C-Dogs campaigns!

Texture Rendering

We’ve also reworked the graphics backend to render textures instead of raw pixels. The goal was to improve performance; unfortunately that failed 😟, but on the bright side, it means we now support semi-transparency effects!

This means we can have better-looking muzzle flashes, and glowy laser beams!

Enjoy the eye candy!

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/0.6.7

31 Oct 2017 » C-Dogs 0.6.6 Released!

Happy Halloween! C-Dogs SDL 0.6.6 released, with two spooky new campaigns, and some cool HUD enhancements!

Grave Intent

A new contributor has created a unique campaign, Grave Intent, with creepy vibes, and skeleton enemies!

AI Insurgency II

Sauer2 and killer robots are back, in this action-packed sequel campaign!

HUD improvements

There’s a bunch of HUD improvements in this release. Ammo notifications as covered in the last post, some text popups when you pick things up, showing a map in a second window, health gauge animations, and more! Thanks to new contributors Ottani and davidrgmcb for some of these.

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/0.6.6

17 Jul 2017 » New HUD

Added some extra ammo notifications to the HUD, like flashing when low ammo:

Let’s compare this to the classic C-Dogs HUD:

A lot of new stuff has been added since then. HUD improvements was one of the first enhancements added to C-Dogs SDL, with the health bar from way back in 2013. From there we’ve added:

• Reload bar
• Popup animations
• Heads (lives)
• Gun icon
• Optional cash/ammo instead of score
• Ammo gauge
• Gauge animations

And of course, the low ammo flash effect. Look out for the new HUD in the next release of C-Dogs SDL!

23 Apr 2017 » C-Dogs 0.6.5 Released!

C-Dogs SDL 0.6.5 released, with a new campaign, new character editor, and some hitscan weapons!

Harmful Crysalis

Sauer2 is back with a cool new campaign, this one with very strong Alien Breed vibes!

New Character Editor

There’s a spiffy new character editor, powered by the awesome GUI library nuklear, with extra previews!

Hitscan Weapons

The C-Dogs collision code has been completely overhauled; now it uses Continuous Collision Detection. In plain terms, it prevents fast-moving objects from tunnelling through each other, and makes it possible to implement hitscan weapons!

This might come with performance penalties though… next release we’ll look at some performance optimisations.

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/0.6.5

05 Mar 2017 » C-Dogs 0.6.4 Released!

C-Dogs SDL 0.6.4 released, and as promised, features a new walk animation!

If you’re curious about the content pipeline for the spritesheet, there’s a writeup here.

There’s a few other improvements too, like adding a small feature where pickups could randomly spawn after destroying map objects, with help from Christian Murphy a.k.a. grimpunch. Go destroy those crates - maybe there’s a health pack inside!

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/0.6.4