Positional Damage, better Radar Art

http://bigdicegames.com/BZone/bzone.html

Stuff I did:

• Radar Display Art - so, RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging, invented in part in Building 20 on the MIT campus: http://www.ll.mit.edu/about/History/RadLab.html, though, sadly, the history of RADAR page on Wikipedia doesn't mention MIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar but if you want to build your own, there's this: http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses/radar_systems.html). I redrew the art at 1024x1024, being careful to keep edges crisp. I then shrunk it down to the ingame size of 128x128, and it looks much better.
• Positional Damage Model - damage is now tracked in five locations (four sides plus interior).
• Positional Damage Display - the trapezoid on the bottom right is how your tank is doing. You can take 2 hits at each location. The guy in our screenshot is hurting; one point of damage remaining in front, zero on the left, and the interior components are down to one point of damage. Careful!

Stuff to do:

• Radar Blips - is that the technical term? You send out a "ping", and I guess it comes back (certainly not called a "pong"), and then it's a blip on the screen. Yet another custom shader, or perhaps two. Some fancy things I could do would be to simulate sweeping the world with radar, so some blips are stronger than others. I could even update the individual blips only as part of the sweep, so a dot appears, then fades away without moving, which would be accurate, but annoying.
• Revisit Projectile Damage - I haven't seen problems yet, but I can imagine that a fast-moving projectile might get most of the way through the vehicle and appear to do damage to the far side of the tank. There's even the possibility of shooting through objects that should be solid, if the projectile's moving faster in one update than the size of the object. It's not a hard fix, but it's not something I need to do yet, so I might keep this at low priority.
• Explosions - with the new positional damage, I've got rid of "one hit, one kill", which was true to old arcade games. The upside is that the enemies take more work to destroy (more gameplay), and you won't lose the game if you weren't watching your six for a moment (though, with a few hits, you'll still be out). The downside is that there's no indication that you've hit an enemy tank. So, a projectile hitting a tank effect will be good, and then a tank blowing up effect will be good. Maybe some particles? Those are easy. Also, sounds.
• Missions - I still want to do this. I've thought a little bit about making them simpler than my original concept where there'd be a lot of tanks in a big world, and you'd be free to wander around and discover them all. That's probably more work than I want to do. So, maybe a few small scenes, rather than a continuous world.
• Damage-aware AI - if a tank gets damaged, it probably ought to run away. And it'd be best if it turned its strongest side to you. Though, if its strongest side is its front, should it charge you? Maybe.