Progress report
It has been quiet here since the Lockdown Protocol 1.0.0 release. There's no reason to worry, both the game project and I are still very much alive.
I have spent a lot of time trying to resolve some nasty compatibility issues with the game. Unfortunately I have not been very successful in that. It turned out that the Direct3D renderer sometimes simply refuses to work in full-screen mode. The simple workaround is to use OpenGL renderer instead, but that in turn was horribly slow on some machines (specifically AMD APUs). I managed to fix my bad decal implementation which was the root cause for the OpenGL renderer slowdowns, but the full-screen Direct3D problem still persists.
Now that the OpenGL renderer works better, I would like to use that by default on Windows too. Unfortunately it has its own compatibility issues. On some Intel integrated GPUs (at least HD4000) in Windows many of the textures are completely missing and I have not found any workaround to this other than switching back to the Direct3D renderer.
In addition to bug tracking and fixing I have made some minor changes based on the player feedback. For example, I have included a sentry gun in the tutorial level as it's not obvious that you're supposed to deactivate them from behind instead of trying to shoot them (unless you have a really powerful weapon). After four years of playing the game it was obvious to me :D
I'm in the process of getting a proper code signing certificate so I could finally get rid of those scary "unknown publisher" warnings on Windows. This might also help with false malware detections. We'll see how that goes.
One last thing, Lockdown Protocol is being featured in this weeks Freekeyfridays giveaway. This is a chance to get the full version for free!
Posted on 2015-04-17