Microsoft conspires against Howard Dean. How's that for a catchy headline? Google is going to eat this up :) I played the Howard Dean For Iowa game for a good 15 minutes today. Only 15 hours until the election where it looked like Howard Dean was going to take Iowa by a landslide, Microsoft intervenes. Go figure. Poor guy didn't even have a chance :( </p
More Monkey Business.... I spent today doing some more RenderMonkey evaluation. Overall, I'd love to use RenderMonkey, but it's got one problem. It can't properly map our models. I know, it sounds like it's a problem with our model. Our model works fine in EffectEdit though. I've sent them a "bug" report. We'll have to see when it comes back. I think I can still u
It's a bird, it's a plane... Nope, it's a RenderMonkey :) I spent the day reading the first ShaderX2 and learning RenderMonkey. It's a pretty cool environment. I was dissappointed in their .fx output. The default .fx screws up EffectEdit. Don't know where the problem is though. I should spend more time looking into it. I think I also found a bug in RenderMonkey 1.0 (build 39). We've got some files that don't get their texture coordinates properly mapped through RM's Stream M
That's quite a list. Thanks. We'll look into them. I already know we should do the booleans (AND, OR) but that adds a whole lot of complexity and we're worried about someone making so many triggers that a game can't be won.
More interesting stuff happening with GalCiv expansion. I've completely integrated the custom maps. Custom star owners and user defined homestars are in as well as the resources. I did notice that the original GalCiv code hardcoded the maximum number of resources to 50. I won't be surprised if we get some weird behavior if there are more than 50 resources. We'll have to fix that. I attended the RenderMonkey web seminar. It was pretty cool. An hour long slide show with Natasha selling us
Nickname where? On JoeUser.com?
Another busy day in the GalCiv world. GalCiv will now read custom maps. This isn't 100% complete, but you can at least play in a custom map. Still todo is figure out how to handle pre-assigned star ownership and homeworlds as well as the whole resource thing. So I created a simple map and loaded it up.... ooops. It's upside down. <img borde
I like to peruse the pre-owned sections of my local EBs and GameStops for a lot of my older games.
More work on Maps, Scenarios and Campaigns this week. I'm finishing up integrating custom maps into GalCiv. Just waiting for the interface hooks so that I can get the name of the file to load. I also added the ability to have custom star names in the MapEditor. It works well with our small trigger system. For instance, you should be able to create victory trigger when a named star system is conquered. Here's an example of the trigger system in the scenario editor. Right now,
Spent today working on the Campaign Editor. I tried to do a multi-column listbox at first, but Ian turned me on to using a CListCtrl. Shows you how much MFC I've done in the last couple of years. I'm amazed at how much skill you lose when you don't use it. It's not like riding a bike. If you forget some MFC flags or tricks, they're gone forever. I'm lucky to have a Windows Internals guru just down the hall :) So, here's the first shot of the campaign editor. Like the scenari
We're still thinking about events so all input is welcome. That's in interesting idea. Multiple effects triggered either in parallel or serial each time the trigger is triggered. We'll have to add that. Thanks.
Finished working on the next round of Map Editor revisions. Here's the latest screen: How would you like to play this map? Got the Drengin war machine breathing down your throat. Hmmm...fun. I've also been asked to think more about events and triggers. Here are my thoughts so far. Events Events consist o
Just finishing updating the Scenario and Map editors to Brad's comments last week. Almost done. I should be done by the end of the week. Here are some screens of the newest functionality: Here you can enter various information about the scenario. These texts will be used when the scenario is loaded and during victory/defeat dialogs. <img border="0
I haven't tried it. I'll give it a shot though. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, they are. The big problem is that the turn based community is old compared to the other games. If a company wants to make money, they have to sell their games. It'll probably be up to a small community of people to develop good turn based games.
WTL Madness I'm in the middle of a little downtime right now. I'm waiting for feedback on the map editor and Cari's getting the GalCiv2 codebase integrated with our demo stuff. Scott is well on his way with Political Machine so I'm stuck here with nothing to do :) Well not really, but nothing that's immediately pressing right now. I've decided to use this time to learn as much as I can about WTL. Ian introduced me to WTL a couple of weeks ago. For those who don't know
The map editor is pretty much done. I'm passing it around to get feedback on it and to get some final ideas to put in. I managed to get some features that other people asked about. The random resources are in. Here are some screens: \ Here you can also see the planet editi
Resource are really easy to place. Much like stars, you just select the type of resource to place and click on the map.
We're examining different options for custom games in the metaverse. I imagine someone will try to create a really easy game and post it.
Thanks. Right now, planet addition works like this: 1) You select a star 2) A planet data panel comes up in place of the current palette on the left side. 3) There's an add planet button and the planets are in a graphical display in the data window. To edit a planet's quality you just edit the number under the planet. Right now the planet quality is generated randomly. Anomolies are added randomly at game time. I don't think we plan on adding anomolies into
The last couple of days have been very productive. I checked in the scenario editor and the improved map editor. I even had time to hook up the 3d camera to the map editor. People probably won't see it though we don't want to give away too much of the GalCiv2 technology. Or do we? Here are some screens from the map editor and the scenario editor. Don't pay attention to the UI graphics. They need a lot of work and I'm not an artist :) <a target="
Yeah, we could do that. We didn't do that at first because I didn't think of a floating palette. It would have been much easier to make a floating palette too.
The only thing wrong with the Add planet button (IMHO) is that it stands out alone. There are three operations you can do with the planets. Add/Delete/Edit. Delete and Edit you can do in the planet window without extra buttons. I wanted to be able to do all three operations in the planet window so that the user would have total control with just the planet window showing. Know what I mean? After looking at it longer, I decided that it was alright that way. I also put the bar on the side
Don't forget one of the best features in iTunes, automatic shared libraries. I can listen to other peoples iTunes libraries without having to bother them. They show up whenever I start it up. For me, that's one of the biggest reasons for using it. Everyone at work has it and my wife is a .Mac head.
Sometimes my mind gets in a muddle because of a bunch of things are going on at one time and I can't focus on one task 'til completion. Do you ever feel that way? I'm feeling it with the map editor. Since there's no real UI design or workflow design, I'm having to make a bunch of stuff up. Guess what, I suck at it. Maybe it's because I've been bred to follow specs and design docs. Usually they weren't 100% correct, but close enough to where I could fill in the blanks with no probl
JoeUser Forums