Milestone 3

[RonHiler]

Heh, yeah except this particular Milestone is pretty dull, I'm afraid. Ah well, it has to be done, and better to get it done early on than later.

Speaking of which, I'm working on steps 9-11 now, which is all about user settings (9 is display settings, 10 is sound settings, and 11 is keyboard/mouse settings).

I have the interface more or less set up, but I'm not entirely sure what settings to give to the players to adjust. Currently for display I have Adapter selection box, a fullscreen/windowed mode toggle, and a resolution selection box. I think I want to add a gamma adjust to that. But is there anything else I should put in?

For sound, I will put in a volume control (obviously) and perhaps a card/driver selection, but I can't think of anything else to add.

And for keyboard/mouse, I have absolutely no clue what to put. I guess we could put in key bindings. I don't think there are really a whole lot of those, though, this is primarily a mouse driven game.

Any suggestions? The options screen I really intended (for this milestone) to just set up and get a few obvious things working, then add to it bit by bit as we work through the milestones and it becomes more obvious what kind of things we need to have in there.

[Shane Christopher]

Graphics wise I would reckon that we will end up having varying levels of detail for the terrain so that it could run on lower end cards and shine on higher end. For example a lower end card by only be able to have the terrain tiles as 256x256 and dropping to 128x128 as you zoom out or whatever the values end up being. A high end card would be able to use 512x512 for every tile visible.

Then we have anistropic filtering and AA if we ever see any corners. Anti-Aliasing for textures could be an option too. Obviously these would be disabled for low end systems.

For sound I would reckon we could have a choice between software and hardware, maybe a limit to the amount of sounds playable at once? Really not that big a deal as even a soundblaster Pro can play 64 sounds at once I believe. Probably far more then we'll ever need.

As for keys/mouse like you said they'll become apparent as we go on. I'd like to see keyboard shortcuts for pretty much every action possible for hardcore players

[RonHiler]

Graphics wise I would reckon that we will end up having varying levels of detail for the terrain so that it could run on lower end cards and shine on higher end. For example a lower end card by only be able to have the terrain tiles as 256x256 and dropping to 128x128 as you zoom out or whatever the values end up being. A high end card would be able to use 512x512 for every tile visible.

Hmmm, interesting thought. I currently have 100 available slots for the 512 map textures, 200 for the 256 textures, and 400 for the 128 textures. If we gave the player a slider with three or four settings, we could make those values changable. So people with more memory on their cards could have more 512 slots. That's a good idea, and easy to implement. I don't want to put esoteric values in the options panel though. Maybe we just give them a slider called "Main Map Memory" and give them Low, Mid, and High settings.

The rest of your suggestions are good too. AA for textures is simple to set up. Not sure about doing FSAA, it might blur the text, which is bad, but I would be all for texture AAing on specific textures.

I think what I'll do is set up the basic ones (and maybe the map memory thing) and we'll work the others into subsequent milestones as needed.

[RonHiler]

Okay, so M3 is moving along pretty nicely. We hit a slowdown when I hit step 9, but I knew that was going to happen. On the good side, I'm almost through it, and I anticipate steps 10 and 11 will be fairly easy as they are pretty similar to step 9, only with less nuances (plus a lot of the setup work for 10 and 11 was done concurrently with step 9).

Looking through the recent log files for the game, I seem to have a bug somehwere in one of the UI elements that is on the configuration page. Most likely the dropdown selection boxes, I would suspect. They are causing the offscreen surface that holds text to continually release and recreate, which it's not supposed to do (it is supposed to do that if the text being placed there is bigger than the surface, but otherwise it's supposed to remain in memory). So something there is definitely amiss.

But other than that, things are looking pretty decent. The display settnigs are being properly pulled from the enumerator and presented, and you can select new settings, and very shortly it will actually apply those new settings, which is kind of a key point

[Shane Christopher]

Gonna have to get me one of them there listy things..

[RonHiler]

So you're probably thinking to yourself, "self," (you thought), "Ron said we were toward the bottom of the M3 list over a week ago, but there's been no news! What happened! Don't tell me he's gotten distracted by another game/project/article/story/home-improvement-project/etc again!".

No, I haven't I got hung up by a fairly nasty bug, so we're still pretty much in the same place we were, which is the very near end of step 9 (with parts of step 10 and 11 complete).

The deal is the program starts off in windowed mode by default. So far so good. If you then go to the options screen and change it to fullscreen mode, it will do so. Still good so far. But now if you change it again back to windowed mode, under certain conditions (i.e. if the windowed resolution is lower than what you had in your fullscreen mode), it would go to windowed mode, but the draw area would cover the entire window, rather than just the client area of the window.

It was a nasty horrendous bug to track down, because it's kind of internal to windows (or at least the way Windows and Direct3D interact with each other). I actually haven't killed it yet, but at least I now know why it's happening, I just have to figure out a way to slip a fix for it in there. I have a pretty good idea of how to fix it, but it's going to take some trial and error, which is the sort of thing that could take 3 minutes or 3 days.

So that's where we are at at the moment. Once I kill this bug (and I'm going to throw up a confirmation timer window), we'll be on to the next step, which is options for the sound. Which *should* be quite simple.

Hopefully

[Shane Christopher]

Sounds like a bad one, hope you get it sorted out okay.

Before I realised what was happening with the repeat keystrokes I had a bug when changing resolution in fullscreen. It would be changing to 800x600 but then change to 1280x1024 so quickly that the screen area it was drawing on would only be the top left 800x600 rectangle, windows showed through on the rest of the screen and the program itself thought it was drawing for the full 1280x1024 screen so you could only see half the screen area you should have.

Was very weird but once I figured out that it was just flying headlong through the resolution changes I managed to stop it. Basically I was using the one key to cycle through resolutions to test them. Because of the repeat keystrokes it was cycling through them too quickly. Now I'm using a different key for each resolution. Now when it repeats it's repeating the same resolution so I don't get that problem.

[RonHiler]

Alright, allow me to rant for a minute.

The bug I talked about above, where when you dropped to windowed mode after being in fullscreen where the graphics would draw over the top of the entire window rather than just in the client area? You know the one.

Well, I fixed it a couple of days ago. Worked and everything, I fully tested it and was satisfied the fix had done the trick. Happy, I moved on to working on the confirmation box (it's a message box that appears when you change your display settings. It's needed because, although your card will support the settings you select (because the program has already determined that before it offered you the option), your monitor might not, so it's possible to get into a setting where the screen is all messed up). So I'm working on that for the last couple of days, and it's causing me no end of grief itself. Sometimes what should be the easiest things are the ones that turn into the biggest pain in the ass.

And as I'm testing the thing this morning, I realize the switch to windowed mode is causing that same bug again that I just fixed two days ago. For what is literally no apparent reason, the bug has come back! This just makes me crazy! I removed the code I had added over the last couple of days and put everything back as near as I could tell to the way it was. And still we are getting this bug despite the fact that the fix I had added is still there.

This kind of thing absolutely makes me nuts. Combine that with the fact that resolution changing deals with Window and Direct3D setup commands which is without question my least favorite area of programming, because it's all stuff that is mostly out of your direct control (you just call API functions and hope everything works like it's supposed to, which half the time they don't). I don't mind UI programming or rules or file reading or AI or any of that stuff, but this particular area is my arch-nemisis. I'd take complex polygon triangulation routines any day of the week over this kind of crap. At least that follows logical rules of math, and if something doesn't work it's my fault, not the fault of some esoteric crappy Windows code which I have no clue on how to best fix.

So yeah, I'm more than a bit frustrated right at the moment. I'll get through it, to be sure, but it sure would be nice if I could get through it soon, you know, with my sanity intact!

[RonHiler]

Well, what a difference 24 hours makes, heh. I refixed the window bug, and it seems to be playing with all the other code nicely. And I also have fixed the confirmation box, so the bugs are gone at this point. I'm continuing on. Have to finish up the functionality of the confirmation box (so that it does the revert and accept thing) and we're done with this step.

It's already been well over a month on Milestone 3, which is longer than I wanted to spend on it, so I'm going to try to push to get this done as soon as I can.

[Strike]

Sometimes the best way to smash bugs is to get a good nap

Which is what I'm going to go do right now.