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

16 Nov 2016 » New Walk Animations

For the next version of C-Dogs SDL, we’re looking at improving the walk animations. This would be a good thing to do before other character enhancements, like character “textures” - think clothes, uniforms, badges and so on.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always felt that the character animations, dating back to good-old Cyberdogs (1994), could do with an enhancement:

Early on in C-Dogs SDL history, the animation speed was tweaked up so that the feet more or less track the ground. Before that it looked very floaty - just check out some videos of C-Dogs (the DOS game) or Cyberdogs online. Unfortunately, because of those short stubby legs, the animation speed is very fast, which makes them look like those cartoon Minions.

Instead, let’s go with a more expressive run cycle, with big leg and arm movements, even some up-and-down movement for the body. Here’s what that might look like:

What do you think? Already going from a 4-frame animation to a 6-frame animation makes it look much more expressive.

Let’s also take this chance to improve the gun-hand. The characters in C-Dogs either hold:

• a generic blaster,
• a knife,
• or nothing

in their gun-hand. Let’s split out the gun from the hand, and have multiple poses, like this one for one-handed weapons:

This one works for grenades and knives too, the hand position is roughly the same.

For two-handed guns, something like this would look better:

Works nicely even though the head and leg animations are identical.

Making these changes will require splitting the sprites into different layers:

• Head
• Torso
• Left arm
• Right arm
• Weapon
• Legs

If we also have 8 directions (up from 4 currently), that means a lot of extra sprite work. To make this easier, perhaps the animation can be done in 3D and rendered. We’ll have to see how this looks, having nice sprites from exported 3D isn’t easy.