Keyboard

As a lot of things in Alien Blitz keyboard support was done quite a long time ago when the game was pure java. So it was heavily generalized to support all engines I went through (java applet first, java desktop, slick2d, and finally LibGdx).

I’ve cleaned up everything and now keyboard support is only done through LibGdx, makes things easier to maintain.

I’ve also simplified key mapping, there can only be one key per action now. By default it will be WASD keys to move except in France and Belgium where it will be ZQSD (only if the locale for the keyboard is fr_FR or fr_BE at first run, so it should be ok for nl_BE).
Detecting AZERTY/QWERTY configuration is quite difficult in Java so it might not work very well on some systems (seems to work fine under Windows, but under a French/Belgium Linux it will always think the keyboard is AZERTY if that’s the system one even after using setxkbmap for some reasons).

 

Option screen

Option screen has been simplified on Android, it just displays a few options. But a new button has been added to go to the Advanced options with more options than before.

On PC clicking options will go directly to the advanced options.

Most of the options are applied immediately except for MSAA, font & language.

 

Key/controller configuration

The key & controller customization is now a lot better than before (Snorms), and works a lot better:

New configuration is applied directly after confirmation.

 

Lighting

Again more work done on lighting, mostly changed shaders for model rendering so that lighting used there is the same as on terrain. So now models are correctly lighted.

I’ve also added some effects on items, the one that can be pick up (life is not 100%, boxes,…) are full light to be more visible.

 

Misc

Changed a lot of small things:

• Control help screen if 3d and/or PC has been changed
• Added a controller help screen on first map if controller is plugged in
• Cleaned up some debug tools
• Changed some particle effects that were not rendering well
• Resizing window, switching to full screen, changing resolution
• Reduced MSAA to 2x by default, can be changed in the options

My to-do is now almost empty, it means I can now do some more tests to fill it up with smaller cosmetic stuffs and bug reports.