Welcome back.
Well, after the release of the alpha 2 version, some testing has been done about bosses and other weird attempts. After few days, Mike Dailly announced his temporary stop coding, because he had to build up the nowadays successful label YoYo Games: a company which stands entirely on his own shoulders can’t share any useful time with the hobbistic projects.
Sad but true, that has been the hurlde that put the project in permanent sleep.
Almost other 5 years passed, and still we don’t see any far light for XeO3. Nonetheless, spitefully of its global stagnation, there’s something that moved inside silently. Here follows a list of what you’d never seen/known about this further dark age.
- walkers’explosion: the walkers have their proper explosion animation, a little piece of graphics I’m proud of; walkers would have been next in the todo list…
- blog post in 2012: the project worth to be restarted even just for the fact that in 2012 people still talk about it;
- charpad conversion: even FatMan, author of the original XeO3 Level Editor, is active on it, and under request, he coded a tool which converts the dedicated files of his editor to the most used CharPad; editing would have been easier and easier by now, see the picture on the right side;
- new panel: new decorative elements have been added to the last panel you all have seen in the test releases, and now several more colours have been used too; here’s a little reminder about the evolution of the panel:
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let’s try the 2nd level: just to see thing are moving in some ways, XeO3 has been compiled keeping the attack waves of the test level, but with the proper music, the colour palette, the new panel and some slices of graphics coming straight from the 2nd level; a symbolic tiny background animation is displayed too, a simple little bubble in what should look like a water puddle:
Mike stated the chance to pass all the code to another coder with better time to spend on. Ok, it would be a change and would be rather possible, but personally I would prefer to wait again (again!) for a miraculous moment of spare time to spend from the Mike’s side.
At the moment, no promises can be made, but I can say to all of you that I’ll never leave alone the XeO3 project, and that I will be ready and 100% on it if a lucky restarting will occur.
XeO3 is not dead yet.