Any number of triggers and payloads can be attached to entities. For now, they will only be used for projectiles (artillery shells), but later they could be used for many other gameplay applications. Triggers can react to collisions, height from ground, proximity to units, or they could activate after a delay. Almost anything is possible, really, but I'm starting with just collision triggers. Payloads are triggered, well, by triggers; they are the "meat" of the projectile system. Again, I'm starting simple with just kinetic (contact damage based on mass, velocity and an armor piercing multiplier) and explosive (yay, particle effects and shrapnel projectiles) payload, but almost anything would be possible. For example, it would be easy to make a cluster bomb that explodes above ground (height trigger attached to directed explosive payload) into many small bomblets (individual projectiles with contact triggers attached to explosive payloads).

More on the triggers and payloads when I get the system implemented.

The bad news is, I had to spend a whole evening porting lepton to Windows so Visual C++ would compile it.

The good news is, I'm now the maintainer and tester of the Windows port of lepton, so hopefully this doesn't happen to anyone anymore. The first Windows installer for Python 2.6 has been released; check the lepton home page. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it compiling for Python 2.5, since I don't own Visual C++ 2003 and building extension modules with the free Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 compiler is a pain in the arse. I might try it again later, but for now, I'm considering myself defeated.

Anyway, you should all check out lepton, it's an awesome library for creating fast particle effects in Python games and other applications, and works out of the box with Pyglet, Pygame and any OpenGL-based applications. It's also easily extensible so you can add your own custom effects to particles. I'll be sure to post any further experiences (and the video I promised) as soon as I get it properly integrated with Artillery Brawl.

PS. note the new link category – "Cool Python modules" – at the sidebar.

One of the biggest changes has been the move of messaging from individual components to the entity itself. I might write about the details later when I've finished my changes and actually used the system for a while, but I can already tell it has reduced dependencies between parts of the code; always a good thing. The biggest test for my entity system will come when I start to implement some more complex gameplay, but so far, so good.

See you next year, happy 2009 everyone!