It's been ages since my last post about this.. partly because I've been a lazy arse and not done any work..
things have been.. difficult.. of late for reasons I won't go into here.

But also because the next task to complete was going to be a complete sod to do. Basically, I had to revisit my entire design for my weapon system. The version so far was based on a very similar system to my old game (i.e. crap), in fact it was pretty much ripped from it and converted to use SDL as opposed to DelphiX.

I wanted to make a generic weapon class which I could inherit from to make specialisations for each weapon. This meant I had to do a LOT of work refactoring my original class structure and more importantly, Unit structure..

Delphi isn't very good at handling circular references so it boiled down to two options.

1, Put all of my classes in the same unit...
or 2, put each class in a seperate unit.

I've actually opted for 1.8 which is put most of the classes in seperate units but keep some very very similar things together with the option of splitting them out later..

It's been a headache to say the least. I've had to add additional classes to get around the circular reference issue, But now it's done.

I've pretty much got my plasma cannon working the way it was before using the new system and I've probably got one more day on getting things tidied up then I can get to work on the other weapons.

They should be a breeze to do with the new class structure now as the main weapon class handles all aspects of weapon simulation. Everything from battery levels, power levels, ammunition, even gyroscopic forces.

Now I can write my minigun weapon which..
a) generates ammo over time
b) has a spin up time
c) once up to speed is really hard to turn due to gyroscopic forces of the barrel
d) can overheat

Now I've got to re-teach the AI how to aim using the new class structure 'cos at the moment, it's really, really confused