The Intent version of Payback has progressed well over the past couple of months and is now fully playable. In addition, the following features have been added:

• Custom maps can be loaded even if they are still compressed as LHAs. This reduces disk usage considerably.
• The title screen has been redesigned to make it more visually appealing and easier to navigate with a mouse or stylus.
• A random mission generator has been added.
• Different camera angles and cross fading when viewing a replay in rotating view mode have been added.
• The replay files have been made even more compact - they now only use an average of 4 bytes per second at 30fps (they used 60 bytes/second before).
• The blood effect has been made more subtle.
• The peds, drones and the police have been made slightly more intelligent.
• The explosion shockwave now warps its surroundings as it goes past.
• The demo version can now be played more than once before exiting.
• Various bugs have been fixed.

The main emphasis now is adapting the game to the capabilities of a PDA. In particular, this means redesigning the control system and reducing the memory usage. I'm planning on doing this by introducing a custom virtual memory system that automatically juggles graphics and sounds in and out of memory as and when they are required. Hopefully this won't take more than a few weeks so the port should be complete by the end of the month. (Fingers crossed! :)

For more information about Payback, click here.