;Day 1
;
;Setup the initial environment - got the ground colour and sky colours setup for daytime and then
;got loads of instances of a simple tree mesh placed all over the world to see how they look. Once the colours had been matched so the
;tree trunks blended to the ground it looked quite stylish and abstract. Made the branches and leaves a single black colour so the whole
;environment is now in monotone. Decided to add a very small blue tint to the sky. I want the environment to be a stark contrast to the bright ;colours of the bikes and lasers and explosions, with a slightly oppressive feel to it.
;
;Experimented with different 2-tone cubemaps to see how good a cel-shaded effect I can get on the tree trunks.
;Finally found one that sort of works - it highlights the edges in black from most angles, goes a bit weird when
;close to the camera at extreme viewing angles but OK in general, and cheaper than the normal method of outlining in 3d where you 
;copy the mesh, make it black and then flip the polygons inside out and inflate them all slightly, which although totally accurate
;doubles the polycount per-tree.
;
;Added some really simple spherical clouds that rotate around the camera in 2 groups. Made them alpha-additive to
;give a strange but pleasant effect.
;
;Created a sunflare with some almost invisible beams to place as a sprite in the sky. Set it to overlay everything else
;which means it renders through the trees but mostly looks OK. Scaled it right up to give more visual impact.
;
;Managed to work out how to assign a single brush to all the instanced trees branch material, so by updating the coords on one texture
;it makes all the tree branches in the world blow around in the wind. It's a subtle effect but a nice touch for the menu / front end background.




;Day 2
;
;Added a ground texture which is a sort of greyscale blobbiness.
;
;Added a really simple bike mesh and positioned the camera in the right place.
;
;Tweaked the tree placement a bit, then decided to do it properly and get it spawning and replacing trees as the bike moves.
;I had 2 options here - move the bike or move the trees. In the end I decided to move the trees because moving the bike leads
;to problems where the player ends up with coords that a too large for Blitz to handle, and means lots of moving stuff around
;to keep it all centred around the player's location.
;Moving the trees keeps everything in a small bubble centred around 0,0,0 in the world, and nothing ever moves that far from the
;origin. When the trees reach the edge of the visible area they are repositioned outide of the rendertweening loop to avoid
;having them flicker across the screen as they move.
;
;Did some stress testing and it seems to handle a good few hundred single trees with no problems. Once the single tree is expanded
;into a single-mesh group of trees I can bring the number of entities down and it will still look really busy. I need to make it
;difficult enough to stop the player at some point.
;
;The ground texture had to go as it remains stationary as the trees glide over it, which looked very odd indeed. 
;The single-colour trees now blend perfectly into the single-colour ground.
;
;Put in the screen-border overlay darkening sprite as seems to be the order of the day with every game these days. It does add depth to the
;screen though, so I like it.




;Day 3
;
;Got more structure into the program - added a global data type so almost everything else is loaded / setup
;as a subobject of this type.
;
;Added a code-archives blur effect - tried the dreamfilter but it's too severe.
;
;Setup all the boring stuff like lives, level number, start positions etc..
;
;Began work on the front-end, using a simple fasttext overlay and a nice LED-style font. Kept it very simple,
;just a start game and exit option so far.
;
;Added a black sprite to be used to fade in and out of blackness during transitions. Got it fading correctly when
;going from the menu to the game.
;
;Added the Retro Remakes splash screen.
;
;Added some debug flags to allow me to skip the splash and menu and jump straight into the game.
;
;Got the bike moving at last, setup the mouse controls to allow it to arc around and speed up / slow down.
;Tested a variety of speeds and setup 5 difficulty levels with increasing top speed limits. Fastest level
;is mad-fast and looks like it will be very tricky.
;
;Added a mouse pointer sprite so it will work full-screen.




;Day 4
;
;First attempt at the collision detection system - tried to use a radius system for the detection of impacts with trees, 
;which seemed to work very well once tuned for range. Then realised that once each tree mesh becomes a single mesh with 
;multiple trees in the harder levels that this won't work anymore.
;
;Swapped to a linepick from the front of the bike to detect the polygon mesh. This took some tweaking to avoid it
;hitting the tree branches and also allow the bike to get close enough to the trunks to feel right in play. Finally got
;it sorted out.
;
;Added the difficulty option to the front end which can be cycled with a mouse click.
;
;Added a 5-line scoreboard for each difficulty. Got the front end to cycle through these if the user doesn't move the mouse for 5 seconds.
;Set a colour for each difficulty from blue through green to red, and then purple for the fastest "insanity" mode. Displayed the scoreboards
;in these colours for consistency. Text looks blocky and nicely retro.




;Day 5
;
;Found that in a fast crash the bike can pass right through the smaller trees - added a couple of pivots to the bike mesh
;so I can linepick right along its length, which seemed to fix the fault even at top speed on the hardest difficulty.
;
;Began work on the crash effects - added a simple fragment type which is currently a dark cube. Got some of these
;being spawned when the player crashes. Managed to get them bouncing and rolling in a reasonably convincing
;fake-physics sort of way.
;
;Setup a new crash-cam mode that places the camera near to the crash for a better view.
;
;Added control option swap to the front end so you can use an XBox360 pad or the mouse.




;Day 6
;
;Added the free LotusR2 particle system for the smoke and flames when the bike explodes.
;Spent ages tweaking 2 emitters to create dark smoke and bright flames. Finally got something that
;looks OK.
;
;Setup the smoke so it spawns slower than the flames. Added a fragment parameter so I can flag some frags
;as on-fire. This allows more flame particles as they only spawn from certain pieces.
;
;Tweaked the fragment bounce so they arc further and bounce less. Scaled them down and coloured them very dark and it creates a pleasing
;explosion with debris. 
;I think I'll leave the fragments as simple cubes because it gives a nice retro-feel to it all, reminds me of Blast Corps on the N64.

;Setup a shake parameter also that decays after a crash so the crash camera shakes. Scaled the shake according to the impact speed.
;
;Tried to get the crash camera in a good place to watch the fragments, but couldn't decide whether I preferred watching
;the crash from the front or rear, so added both and made it randomly select one of them. It may end up inside a tree from time to time
;but I can't see how to cure that without some complex code checks, unless I can use MeshesIntersect - normally a command too slow to use
;for collision detection in realtime but if its only used once at the start of the crash sequence then it might work.
;
;Bumped up the number of fragments to make the crash look better. Setup their initial speeds from the bike impact
;speed so the faster the crash the further they fly.
;
;Added some extra flames at the point of impact which are spawned for a couple of seconds only, as if the tree is on fire. Provides a nice
;central focus for the crash event also, rather than just getting a closeup look at a tree trunk every time.
;
;Added a free .ogg music loop that cycles on the front end. Faded it out for in-game. Need to get some sounds from somewhere, such as
;a laser firing, explosion, engine sound and whoosh of trees passing close by. Might also add a wind-rush noise at speed to make it feel
;faster.
;
;Setup the fade out after a crash to go to red.



;Day 7
;
;Setup night mode and got the game to pick day or night on alternate levels. Night is very dark - had to make the moon less bright and
;smaller than the sun. Experimented with a couple of planets but they looked crap so removed them.
;
;Adjusted controls so that you need to hold the accelerate button to maintain speed, to allow the player to fire the lasers using the
;other button. Might rig it so that once started the bike automatically accelerates to top speed, or put that as a menu option.
;
;Tweaked the scale of the moon sprite so it doesn't look too pixellated.
;
;Created a laser object type and added a basic laser firing routine.
;Added a laser sprite and got it facing and firing the right way, and amazingly it seems to feel about right in action which is odd because
;as the bike never actually moves (it's just the trees that move) and I was expecting the lasers to behave in a visually strange way.
;
;Need to work out how to run the enemy bikes next - as the player never moves I have to make the bikes appear in range after some initial
;exploring, then bring them closer and hold them at the shootable range as long as the player remains at top speed. They also have to appear to
;be trying to dodge the trees and weave around, but also make some overall direction changes so they're not just going in a slightly wiggly
;but mostly straight line.
;
;Changed the post-crash fade out back to black as the red was just too overpowering.





;Day 8
;
;Added a basic enemy type with the usual params, parented the visual mesh to a pivot that stays at 0,0,0 and just rotates - this means the visual
;mesh is moved out along the Z-axis only dep. upon how far away it is.
;
;Added an enemy creation routine and got it placing enemies at random distances and directions. Also gave each enemy a random colour.
;
;Added some simple clearout routines that remove all the lasers, fragments, objects etc.. to be called between lives and between levels.
;
;Corrected a bug where the base laser object was visible during the crash-cam sequence.
;
;Created the basic enemy update routine which hides the enemies if they are outside the visual range. Tested this in-game and it seems OK - the
;enemies appear in the distance once in-range and appear to be travelling ahead of the player through the trees. The only problem immediately ;apparent is that if you belt along at max speed after a while all the enemies will be in visual range at once. This may not be a problem once the ;enemies are weaving around.
;
;Need to find a nice way to display the number of remaining lives - I need to display lives left, score and level number on-screen. The retro way
;is to just display this with text at the top or bottom of the screen, but I'd prefer a text-free display if possible.
;
;I'm thinking of adding a simple radar display to show directional indicators to the enemies, which turn red once the enemy is in-range. This would
;be a round rader with triangular beam bars that rotate in the relative direction of the enemies.
;
;Refined the bike mesh slightly in AC3D to include handlebars and front laser pods. Also created a very simple laser beam object to use instead
;of a sprite to give it more shape. Positioned these into a doulbe laser and set the firing position correctly so the beams appear to emerge from
;the laser pods on the front of the bike.
;
;Twweaked the enemy handling code to the enemy bikes appear to be moving parallel to the player rather than directly away from him. A bit of a
;bodge this as the bikes never really move, but visually it looks better than always having the bike rear-on no matter what angle it is on the
;screen. Added the steeing angle here also so they appear to turn correctly when leaning over.
;
;A small tweak to randomly colour the fragments either black or grey, which match the colour of the bike mesh better.





;Day 9
;
;Added a random colour option to the player's lasers for a little visual variety, also made the bike mesh take on this colour along with the brighter
;fragments when crashing - not sure if this extra colour suits the monotone environments so I may take this out.
;
;Added a small helmet sprite to represent the players lives, placed these bottom-left of the screen for the moment, coloured them to match the bike.
;
;Moved the explosion generator into a seperate routine that takes various position and colour params so I can re-use it for the enemy bikes.
;Modified the explosion routine to allow more control parameters, such as frag life, frag yaw spread etc... so the routine can work well when
;creating an explosion for an enemy bike.
;
;Added 2 new Lotus emitters for the enemy bike explosions that spawn particles with lower lifespans.
;
;Tested the top difficulty level at Insanity and can't get past the first row of trees, so no worries about the game not getting hard enough.
;
;Adjusted the frag handler so that an enemy bike spawns fewer frags than the player, and made them have no damping and instant culling when stopped.
;Set their speed as a negative but with a limited vertical speed so they are mostly projected back towards the camera and removed fairly quickly.
;Set the emission angles tighter than for the player also so there's less of a circular spread and more of a directional shower of fragments.





;Day 10
;
;Discovered a bug with Blitz and the NVidia 8800GTX card where sprites parented to the camera can tear badly when the camera is moved or 
;rotated, which was resulting in a huge screen glitch in the black fade between crashing and respawning. Noticed the same thing in HUD sprites in
;another program. No obvious fix so I swapped over from a sprite to a very thin cube for the fade overlay.
;
;Setup the lives system so it correctly displays the correct number of helmets in the bottom left of the screen. The level number will be placed
;at the bottom-right with the score top-central.
;
;Modified the life display to fade in and out with the game, and also to be hidden on the front end.
;
;Added the first scoring routine, awarding points for each bike destroyed based on the current level. Also added a check that awards a huge bonus
;if the player can destroy more than one bike with a single shot - I'm not 100% sure that this check will actually award the points in the right ;way, need to test it somehow or see if it triggers by accident - put in a debug output for this event so I can tell when it happens.
;
;Modified the level start routine to increase the number of enemy bikes every 5th level, to a maximum of 10. Minimum is 2. Also modified the level
;start text to display the number of enemies under the "Day Patrol" / "Night Patrol" messages.
;
;Adjusted the entire level balance to get a better difficulty curve - reduced the difficulty options to 3 - EASY, NORMAL and HARD, then adjusted
;the way the tree objects are spawned to remove the 4th group of trees. The total number of trees now gets reduced on levels below 10, and above
;level 15 the maximum movement speed is gradually increased to ensure an increasing challenge. The number of baddies spawned is now determined
;by the level also, so you start with 2 baddies and by level 30 you have a full complement of 10 baddies to shoot. 
;
;Added the score to the top centre of the screen and reduced the number of high-score-boards to 3 to match the difficulty levels. Also moved the
;lives indicator to the top left, level number will now go top right I think.
;
;Added the number of baddies still to shoot to the level intro text.
;
;Added the GAME OVER text to the fade out when you run out of lives, also slowed down this last faed and increased the number and ejection angles
;of the frags so they make a nicer final explosion.
;
;Added a small sideways slide to the bike camera when cornering to make it feel a little more dynamic.
;
;Adjusted the tree placement to allow more variation in the scale of the single trees, and also allow them to lean over a little bit.
;
;Altered the number of points awarded for shooting bikes and completing the level so they're higher : 1000 points per bike, 10000 for destroying
;more than 1 bike with a single shot, 20000 for completing a level (to be increased also dep. upon the level number). Made a small addition so firing
;a shot deducts 10 points, so careful shooting nets a higher score than random blasting.
;
;Sorted out the level to level transition, so for the first time I can play through the game in the correct manner. It starts to get difficult at
;about level 10 on NORMAL mode, on EASY it should be more forgiving until the speed eventually ramps up.
;
;Scaled up the flame particles for the enemy bikes to provide a bit more visual oomph.
;
;Modelled the final form tree 1, quite low poly (about 280 tris). Tested import and it works OK, just need to setup the surface painting so it gets
;correctly cubemapped and the branches animate.




;Day 11
;
;Bought a copy of Silo3D Pro, which is a much closer to 3DSMax than AC3D. Built the final speeder mesh using it, also built an enemy rider model (very
;low poly, just an arrangement of cubes) and a pair of arms to show on the player's bike. Sorted all the scaling issues, mapping etc.. and got the
;game importing these new meshes from .obj files using some import code found on the Blitz site.
;
;Tidied the data structures to include fields for all the required meshes, to enable me to keep track of them all.
;
;Modified the .obj import code so it can locate the correct texture and load it with the mesh, tested it on a few meshes and it seems to work. It requires
;the material in Silo to be named the same as the full texture filename, then it strips out the mesh path from the filename and loads the texture from
;the same place.
;
;Located a bug in the .obj importer whereby a polygon face without texture coords would produce an ouput file line of 36//36 instead of 36/23/36 - the
;missing middle number is the texture vertex identifier. The error can be solved by remapping the object to ensure it always has texture coords on every
;polygon, but I've marked the place in the importer code with a possible fix next time I get this error occuring.
;
;Modified the game so it's loading the first base tree mesh from the .obj, centred and scaled correctly. Added a material processing routine to cycle
;through the object and ID the branch and trunk materials, and set them to the correct global materials which are cubemapped and masked+moving.
;
;Adjusted the daytime ground colour to match the tree trunk material so they blend nicely.
;Realised that the trees show up grey at nighttime whereas everything else has a blue tint, so adjusted the mesh colour to fit better.
;
;Created the final 2 groups of trees and set them up correctly to import as .obj files. Experimented with a simple shadow graphic under each tree which
;looked quite nice but spoiled the aesthetic of the tree trunks blending into the ground, and they also glitched a bit on the horizon, and as this is the 
;focal area when chasing the enemy it was very distracting, so I removed them.
;
;High score save and load is in and working, so scores on the 3 tables are carried over between program restarts.
;
;Modified the .obj import routine some more to prevent it creating a new surface for every material change. It now scans through the existing surfaces
;and looks for one already using the same texture, then re-uses that one instead of creating a new surface. Brought the surface count on the large
;tree group from 23 back down to the 2 that it should be, so Blitz should be much happier rendering a lot fewer surfaces.
;
;Added an extra menu mode to display the "created by me" message after the scoreboards.
;
;Things still left to do - build the proper cloud mesh in Silo, possibly add the bonus tank and helicopter, although I've no idea how I'm going to get
;them to look correct...having them drive straight across the horizon as they do in the original is going to look pretty bad...maybe add in a bonus
;golden enemy bike that appears every now and then and changes direction very fast to make it hard to hit.