• fixed crash bug on exit when statistics folder is missing from data folder.
• Added Deflector. This is always available when the paddle is. Press and hold shift to use it. It will cause Collectible Orbs to bounce off the paddle and powerups will explode. This is useful for avoiding certain power-ups. Be warned that the paddle will take damage from the resulting explosion.
• Added AdvancedLevelBuilder. Still buggy since it sometimes chooses blocks that aren't used or are buggy in some way.
• Added "QuadSpinner"enemy. Similar to Laser Spinner, but shoots one from each side. This enemy is still being tweaked.
• Added PolygonObstacle; This is as of yet not used. It is essentially a polygon that will be "moved about" by any ball impacts. I'm deciding what to do with it, and in what ways it could work. (destroy blocks it hits or something).

• Fixed a crapton of crash bugs related to some of the refactorings made in 2.7.0
• changed some image content.

• Added "WoodBlock". This block can only take damage from hits that occur on it's side. Logic being you need to hit it "in the grain".
• Tweaked the drawing of "Cracked" blocks to work more generically. This also fixed some visual issues with the old method.
• Fixed a few crash bugs. Also re-added a music file that was missing from the installer.
• Majorly refactored the internal event system. Now the events use the "C# standard practice". This has no outward effect, but I also fixed a few race conditions while I was there too, so that's a win as well.

• Tweaked Splash Screen/About box. Assembly view (when used as about box) now sizes properly, and displays icons for each item, too. It also is enabled for sorting User size.
• rewrite the SandBlock, and made it visible in the Editor. Note that it still works a bit oddly, and has some clipping issues, but it works much better than it did previously (which is why it's now visible, duh)
• Made some fixes to the Editor, and fixed some attributes and assignments.
• Rewrite the LaserShot, so it can now bounce off blocks.
• refactored some parts of the editor. The outward appearance is the same but the code is a lot better to work with now.
• Added Game Statistics. These are not yet displayed anywhere, though. (They are tracked per levelset as well as globally).
• Added bosses. These are not yet present in the game's default Levels and capabilities, however. To check it out, use "eyeboss" as a cheat. The cheat menu is accessible with Control+Shift+C.
• tweaked Highscores being shown, now it will go faster if the mousebutton is pressed, similar to the score display.
• removed the original startup sound (level startup) now the only two are the various Arkanoid reinstrumentations.
• added numbounces field to temporary ball behaviour: ball now bounces a given number of times before suiciding itself. Naturally, this defaults to 1, so that all the code that existed before works the same. Used initially for...
• LaserSpin Powerup, and tweaked corresponding Terminator Behaviour. Ball moves slower and shoots lasers faster, which is fine since the lasers bounce, as indicated before. Has a rather negative impact on performance....
• Fixed the SoundDataListEditor again.
• Lasers also bounce off of the Polygon blocks- other changes to the core classes have increased some of the capabilities with regard to Editing.
• Added SwitchBlock, which allows setting a GroupID. when all Switches of a given GroupID are all on or all off, the Active or Inactive Trigger ID's of each are fired.
• Allows Dropping of supported files on the Editor to load them
• All destructive operations (that would reset or replace the active LevelSet data which has not been saved) now have a confirmation dialog.
• Added a drop down for Undo and Redo, to Undo or Redo to a given stack position. This might be in the previous version but I seem to remember working on it recently.
• Fixed "QueuedSoundManager" which is used for some music and the introduction sounds.
• Selection in Editor uses rainbow hues, to make it easier to see with some block colours.

• *Updated to Visual Studio 2010, and updated project to use .NET 4.0. This is something of a major change user-side since it means you will need to have .NET framework 4.0 installed. If you do not have this, it can be downloaded here.
• *Tweaks to Editor and associated Block interfaces to work better with Polygon objects.
• *Fixed some issues and race conditions that cause InvalidOperationExceptions.
• *Tweaked file handling. LevelSetBuilder interface now gets a IWin32Window Owner parameter so dialogs and messageboxes they show can be given the proper location in the windowing finite state machine of the OS. End result is that there no longer appears to be that annoying issue whereby dismissing a dialog opened from the editor will focus the game window instead.
• *HOPEFULLY fixed the issue surrounding the previous addition of Game Explorer parts.
• *Update System re-enabled. Turns out it was working fine all along, for the most part.
• *General improvements to the update functionality.
• +Added PolygonBlock, as well as an EllipseBlock. These still do not work properly with the GameCharacter, but balls bounce accurately off of them.

• *Changed code to be more framerate independent.
• *Fixed PowerupcycleBlock. It now works properly
• *Fixed tetherblock to use Game-based timing rather than absolute (pausing the game pauses it's timer)
• *same as above, for VomitBlock
• +Added Templates to the editor. Still a work in progress. Add .BLF files saved with the "Allow use as template" option checked in creatorproperties to %APPDATA%/BASeBlock/Templates folder
• *Fixed SoundDataListEditor (used for editing the list of "embedded" sounds.
• *Fixed Recent List MRU in Editor. (Adds items that are opened and saved, whereas before it only added files that were saved).
• *holding Control key during startup presents a dialog allowing the selection of a sound engine.
• *Enemies now give points when they die.
• *NormalBlock now has a property that determines which sides get a border.
• *Changed PlatformObject to work much better under new platform independent code.
• *Tweaked colours of the fireparticle.
• *changed many elements (text elements, particularly) to improve smoothing mode; also added outlines to those outlines to make sure they are visible regardless of background colour.
• *Changed platformObject to move with moving blocks, and added MovingPlatformBlock (observable in "Platforming7.blf" testing levelset included with the game).
• *improved ImageClipBlock so it caches it's "piece" of the larger image.
• *Fixed editor bug that caused a IndexOutofRangeException when reloading the same file and navigating through levels in the Levels tab.
• *Fixed bug where BrickBlock was invisible in the editor
• +Each level has a list of powerups that are possible to spawn in it, which can be changed in the editor.
• *Added a broken debughelper. use Shift-F3 to toggle.
• *Changed application icon to reflect new NormalBlock.
• *Orbs now bounce off the sides of a level
• *Fixed bug with QueuedSoundManager that was causing some Music bugs.
• +Added Control-Alt-H shortcut when highscores are displayed to reset the high-score list for the level. This does not prompt!
• +High scores listing has a "drop-shadow" effect.
• +Added a bit of code to make Portable installations possible. I need to document this more thoroughly; basically, put an INI file in the same directory as the executable to make it "portable". (the appropriate folders can be changed in that INI file to reflect the portable location).
• +Added Support for the Windows "Game Explorer". At least, I think I did...
• *Changed Frustrator Powerup; instead of causing the frustration effect of the block, it now spawns a FrustratorBall. a FrustratorBall is the opposite of a normalblock, and only bounces off destroyed blocks, causing them to respawn. (it's as disallusioning as it sounds)
• Probably added a bunch of other stuff that I didn't put in the devlog I'm basing this list on

Old Versions:

Update, Version 1.1:

Fixed a bug that broke function parsing. Not sure how I missed it the first time.

ANOTHER Update:

BCDodger is a simple game written in C#. Your mouse controls a group of spinning objects, which represent your possumist comrades. You must move them to protect them from the flying mercedes logos, which represent various features of mercedes automobiles.

When a mercedes Logo touches a possum follower, it converts that possum follower to the dark lord mercedes, and you lose them as a comrade.

It might be best to not have a story....

To run this, run the EXE in the "debug" folder (BCDodger\BCDodger\Bin\Debug\BCDodger.exe)

This is because I'm lazy and all the resources are in that folder.

the code already supports an APPDATA folder containing said resources, but that would mean there is an installation step, and at the moment I'd rather not have to deal with the woes of MSI installers.

Also: I recommend running the "demo" (from the file menu) before you play a game. if you play a game, get game over, and then play the demo, the background stays red and the timing is off. (easy fix, but I figured I had been postponing releasing it for long enough).

UPDATE: Thanks to Tux2 (of http://www.jrtechsupport.com/) there is now a Mono compatible version. This can be downloaded here.

The main reason changes were required was that I opted to use a sound library that is only works on windows. More annoying is the general lack of sound support in the otherwise pretty complete .NET framework (to my understanding .NET 4 adds Sound capabilities). Oh well.

BCDodgerX is my "rewrite" of the older BCDodger. BCDodger was my first serious foray into C# Programming and .NET, and it has a lot of issues. Since I hadn't dealt with XNA much and the concept of the game was simple, I decided I would rewrite it using XNA. I originally started it in XNA 3.0 with VS2008, but at some point swapped over to VS2010 and XNA 4.0, even though I don't use any XNA 4.0 features to my recollection. Oh well.

The "Installer" program is actually a self-extracting executable which extracts the files that were created from the XNA publish tool and runs the XNA setup program.

• Requires the .NET framework, version 4.
• Resolution is "locked" at 800x600. This will be an option. Eventually. main issue is that different sizes could change the difficulty, though.
• High scores are saved. The High-Score handing is done by the exact same code that handles High-Scores in BASeBlock, but some of the features (such as managing different score lists which is used for levelset-based handling in BASeBlock) are not used. The highscore file can be found in %appdata%\BCDodgerX.
• Since I haven't dealt with XNA before I'm not 100% sure what is needed to properly install it, so I just used the XNA publish tool.

Update: 2.1.0

Fixes a few bugs and crashes with the program. Stop button is actually usable.

update: Version 2.0.0

It's been a while, but I finally decided to release the latest version of BCSearch. This version incorporates quite a number of new features. The intended "actionfilters" functionality is disabled currently (you may uncomment the appropriate portions of the Menu XML file to re-enable the feature) I also added an easter egg that I'm sure will be quite amusing to those who find it.

I also added the "simple" filter mode. At the moment it provides a file mask and the ability to use a regular expression for that file mask in a search, but that's it.

I also added a splitter bar that splits the upper and lower panes and allows one to size them as desired. No doubt this has added about 500 new bugs to the program.

When trying to create a working setup, I found issues whereby the program crashed on Vista nad earlier but crashed on XP. since I haven't yet tested this on 2000, it's fully possible it still crashes there, as well. I managed to hunt down the problem (or more precisely, I haphazardly changed things until it seemed to work) and it no longer crashes on startup.

update: Version 1.9.00

This version has seen the squashing of several listview related bugs, culminating in a major "fix" for the VBAccelerator listview. Technically, the way it was originally allowed for a few predetermined sorting modes. Since BCSearch "formats" the size data as KB MB, and so forth, sorting numerically on that column would not be desirable. What I was doing was placing the size in a certain "itemData" field of each listitem. This worked. Except that itemData cannot hold a number larger then around 2 billion, or about 1 GB. files larger then this still displayed properly, but the overflow error meant they were sorted as 0. I popped open the VBAccelerator ListView control and plopped in a new Event for custom sorting, which I now use for the size column. (not the size on disk column, which is simply something I forgot until just now.

Note: Some users have reported errors regarding already present copies of dll and ocx files the installer tries to copy. Any OS that has System File Protection (2000 and up) should have the proper versions of these files already installed- therefore, this error can be safely ignored.

UPDATE: Version 3.4.2: no longer chokes on quoted filenames. tidied up /h output.

DirectSound was a tough one; the main reason I decided to switch was that, for some reason, I was causing playsound() to leak. This often ended up with my audiodg.exe process consuming over 4GB of RAM whereby it should only get around 10 or 12K.