Update-Updates

Some minor changes made to the Bounty Hunter demo.
Doesn't look like much on the surface but there's been quite a lot thrown in there behind the scenes.

CHECK IT OUT HERE

DON'T SHOOT THE LEADER though! There's no code to take care of what happens code-wise for the other NPC's after the main NPC clip has been removed. You might crash your browser due to null references.

Enemies can now be spawned as a clan/team. The properties of all the sprites are stored in objects and can all be referenced to each-other like a linked-list. When a new clan is generated a random member is designated as the 'leader' (and given a Glow filter) and the others will follow their boss at a set distance as if they were parts of an IK chain. If a leader is eliminated another will crop up to take his place (not implemented yet). Leaders of clans will go towards a set battleground co-ordinate in space and when they're within a desired distance the AI will switch over to battle mode and they'll be able to scrap it out until all that's left is space debris. From a coding viewpoint battle mode means an NPC will randomly select an enemy from the opposing clan and war it out until somebody is dead. From then on the dice are rolled once more and another is chosen, and this goes on until the entire clan is wiped out. Theoretically you could have all the enemies gang up on one poor guy, though I met set the odds more in favour of you being the target. Obviously you can eject once you feel your health is about gone, but this will carry some vulnerablility being that your gravity suit can only go so fast, you'll require a host ship to takeover, and it'll be a one-shot-you're-dead situation.. Later on I'll likely make it so the astronaut can fire some manner of feeble lazer to give him a small fighting chance to weaken ships and make them boardable.

Your job will be to protect your soldiers from getting wasted- at the same time you'll have to net other more powerful ships just to keep yourself alive, or maybe to add to make your team stronger for the later stages.
Technically the game is not at the forefront of AS3 wizardry but so far everything has worked out the way I saw it in my head. Still got some funny bugs cropping up- such as when you try to board ships (-related to swapping depths I'll bet) but it's playable.

Starships have nice jet-fumes now. The more fume clips I add the better the effect, but unfortunately it was slowing down the action heavily and I had to forsake beauty for muscle in this case. Although the results of running some tests using BitmapData instead of mc's proved to give more speed I couldn't quite work out a couple of nasty untraceable errors I was getting at compile time, so for the time being clips will do...

Hey when you think about it, we're not a million miles away from a game here. It'd be nice to get this one wrapped up as I'm itching to get back to my fighters. That SORF demo is just begging to be made into a full game.

As for all the rest, I'm thinking to rewrap Trivia Casino with some more functions and send it out with my blessing amongst some more portals. It's not a bad quiz game after all, though it's not bringing me in a penny right now-in fact I've a theory the MochiAds code isn't working- my stats say 0 visitors in the past month..