Added a menu. It's not centered yet.

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Centered the menu.

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Started to create a level editor for the game. All it can do right now is convert grass tiles to water on a blank (all grass) map.

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Surprisingly, development is going along fast. I think it's because there are no boss fights this time (I can't think how a Spy Hunter clone can have boss fights). The car physics is the only true challenge.

Level editor now supports all tile images which can be switched using the keyboard.

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Editor can now place objects (only the civilian cars at the moment) and can mark tiles as drivable (marked in red). I've also included a HUD on the right that currently only displays the current tile.

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Editor can now place objects other than the civilian cars. A camera has also now been implemented in the editor.

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Huge update to the level editor. Both saving and loading have been implemented along with a simple menu for selecting the level you want to edit. I've also added the power-up crates to the editor. Now it is actually usable.

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Actually creating levels now.

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Work a lot on the level editor. I've added edge tiles, but this caused a problem with the level format because the number of tiles is now in the double digits and I was using two digits in the tile maps. The first determined if the tile was drivable or not and the second was the index of each tile. I had to make the tile maps triple digits now because of that.

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I've also allowed the changing of the x coordinate where the player character starts.

Not pictured, but I'm also working on an additional enemy. This one lays mines if the player is behind it.

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Added the mine car. It lays mines when the player is behind it.

If you noticed the lag. The game lags when there are too many cars onscreen. I don't know why. It's a 2D written in C++. I normally create levels where there aren't that many cars at once.

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Now, I'm working on a high score table. I got it to load random scores from a text file and sort them by score using the insertion sort algorithm.

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So, I think I fixed the lag problem, key word being "think". So, in SFML, you have two objects for sounds: sf::SoundBuffer and sf::Sound. The sound buffer just loads the sound file. And sf::Sound is an instance of said sound with a pointer to the buffer. Up until now, I have every game object holding all of the sounds they play in their own sf::Sound objects. I thought it wouldn't be a strain on the memory because the actual sound data is stored in the buffers, but now I have a singleton class to handle all the sound playing.

I've noticed that there is somewhat less lag when there is a clutter of cars, but I haven't truly verified that yet. I haven't done it on a huge cluster of cars. Anyway, this should be a good thing, because the game is piss easy right now with amount of enemies on-screen.

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Okay it doesn't seem like it's fixing the lag. At least it did fix the problem of audio crashing (apparently you can't have more than 140 sf::Sound objects in memory). I will try to fix the problem tomorrow because my adderall is wearing off.

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Maybe it did fix the lag, but only slightly. I've also rearranged some if-statements, which also seemed to help.

Regardless, if you drive slowly enough, eventually all the cars in the level will appear on-screen at once because the only start moving once they are fully onscreen and will only disappear once they are on the bottom of the screen. So you will eventually get lag. But nobody is going to play the game that way so who cares?

Unlike my previous game, enemies do have some sort of AI, as opposed to just having patterns. Naturally, there are a few state machines and lot of if-statements even for this basic AI, but that's also because of poor planning. Some could be turned into switch statements.

Also, having a mine car does increase difficulty, a little bit. So, I probably won't need that much more cars on screen.

Anyway, the game is coming along nicely and quickly regardless. Like the last game, don't expect anything ground-breaking, just something that would be fun for a couple of minutes.

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Added name (initials) entry to the high score table, as in you can change the characters around, but can't save the highscores, yet.

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Oh, I've also replaced one large if-else statement with a switch statement. I think that might help with performance. Contrary to popular belief, a switch statement and an if-else statement do not compile the same way. if-else uses branching instructions (constantly checking for and calculating conditions) while a switch statement uses a lookup table.

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I've added a checkpoint system. Checkpoints have to be added manually in the text file because I haven't put them in the level editor yet.

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@coolboymew Yes. I thought about doing another shmup, but I didn't want it to be about spaceships or planes this time, and I know next to nothing about "magical anime fairy/witch type shmups", so I went with the Spy Hunter route. The challenging part is dealing with car physics. Namely, bumping into other cars.

@Rocket As a kid, I would play the flash version all the time on Midway's website.

@xianc78
Good job, it fits the theme perfectly

@LukeAlmighty Thanks. Now, going off from your deleted post (not offended btw), I just realized that not everyone has a middle name, which may be a problem.