The First Spark?

[RonHiler]

Hey gang,

Something sort of interesting happened last night that I wasn't really expecting. But it takes a bit of intro for me to explain it, heh. So bear with me.

Let's be honest. The work on MD to this point hasn't exactly been massively interesting. What I have been working on is all necessary stuff, but it's all *intro* stuff. It's not really game related. I mean, yeah, you will be designing races, and setting game world parameters and such, but that will be what you do before the game starts, not what you are doing when you are actually playing. We have very little in at this point which is actually game related (other than the basic design of the world screen).

I'm glad we're getting through this first, because it means the really interesting programming (and releases) will be coming, and when they hit, you will actually be able to enjoy them rather than just look at them from the outside because you can't actually play without having a race, or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I think MD is going to be an amazing game, we just haven't hit that part of the design doc where the really good stuff is going in (I figure that will happen starting around milestone 7, when we get an actual world on the world screen with resources and units and stuff and it really begins to feel like a game).

So anyway, I figured we would just plod through all this initial stuff without a whole lot of excitement for a while. And that's basically what it's been. But then last night, as I was going to sleep, I found myself excited (hmm, that's not really the right word, but I don't have a better one at the moment) over where MD is at right now. And I realized that that is because even though we don't have a lot of gameplay elements in yet, there are a few that are starting to poke through the mundane elements of the code.

We have habitibility, but that's not what did it. Habitibility is kind of an abstract concept, it controls how fast your populations are going to grow in your cities, it's not a lot to peak my interest. No, what did it was the racial bonuses. Specifically, resources. Over the last couple of days I've been putting in the racial bonuses for resource collection and use, and they are specific to each resource (at the moment I have only a list of 7 of them, but I expect that to grow).

For whatever reason, resources are a more concrete thing to me. They will exist on the map, the civilizations will be collecting them, I mean they affect virtually every aspect of the game. This is literally their first manifestation in the game, even if it's just as a label on the race design screen. And it sparked that "Wow, this is going to be cool" feeling in me, in more than just the vague way I've had up until now.

There will, no doubt, be more of these moments in the future as the game comes along, and they'll get more common and more intense, I'm sure. But this was the first one, and that makes it memorable, to me at least.

Or maybe it's just that I'm easily amused

(and oh yeah, I'm really hoping to finish Milestone 4 by no later than May 4th. That will be its 3 month anniversary (which is about 3 times as long as the other ones took). That gives me a bit over a week, and I think that can be managed, since I'm pretty close to being done at this point. I'd really like this milestone to not go over three months long, for no particular reason)

[Shane Christopher]

Those feelings are what drive us to create something great. As always I'm glad to help out with graphics in my spare time. Let me know if you're going to start needing interface items.

[Strike]

Yeah, always a great feeling when that happens!

Certainly a relief from bugfixing drudgery, which is where I'm stuck right now

[RonHiler]

Those feelings are what drive us to create something great. As always I'm glad to help out with graphics in my spare time. Let me know if you're going to start needing interface items.

Feel free You know where the interface graphics folder is, so by all means, be my guest, hehe.

In particular though, I'd like to replace the left arrow and right arrow buttons, as they don't really fit with the rest of the interface graphics. They also need hover state and pushed state graphics as well.

But really, anything you see that you think could be done better, just go ahead and do em as you have time. No need to wait on me, hehe.

[RonHiler]

(and oh yeah, I'm really hoping to finish Milestone 4 by no later than May 4th. That will be its 3 month anniversary (which is about 3 times as long as the other ones took). That gives me a bit over a week, and I think that can be managed, since I'm pretty close to being done at this point. I'd really like this milestone to not go over three months long, for no particular reason)

Well, this isn't going to happen. How many times do I have to miss dates before I remember not to give them out, hehe. Oh well. I misunderestimated the amount of UI work needed to get all the race options in. Putting in UI stuff is not hard, but it is quite tedious and time consuming. I have most of them in, but there are still two more sets to add (Espionage and Leader bonuses). So there's probably a good 20-30 or so buttons and text and scales and stuff left to program in and get working.

And then there's quite a bit of random misc. stuff to do, like initial default values and adding the new stuff to the race save files and point costs and making sure the things you are taking aren't going over your total points and showing costs for the next level of bonus and so on and so forth. Nothing hard mind you, just a lot of little stuff.

We are at the end of the milestone, it's just going to take me a few days to add all these things in.

There is going to be a "known issues" list for this one, it won't be 100% totally bug free. There are two of them, and neither is big or game breaking, just a couple of things I won't have time to fix for this release (or at least, things I don't want to hold up the release for).

[RonHiler]

I have to share this with you guys, because it's kind of funny.

One of the "known bugs" I talked about in the previous post was about the little intro movie we had. When I upgraded my compiler, the movie stopped playing for some reason. It would skip past it and go right to the menu screen. I wasn't going to try to fix this for the next release, but was going to look into it before starting M5.

Well as I was coding along, this morning I discovered that the input edit boxes were typing in all caps, even without the shift keys down, which was new (I guess I hadn't used them for a while). So I went into my DirectInput class to try to figure out why this bug suddenly appeared out of nowhere. After a bit of messing with stuff, I realized that if I pushed and released both shift keys, I could then type in lowercase again, so that suggested something wasn't getting set right at initialization. From there, it was easy to spot that I had forgot to set some values in the keypress structures during construction, and what was in there was garbage. This had the effect of the program thinking the keys were all in some random state until you pushed them, at which point they'd go to their proper state.

So I went ahead and fixed that and ran the program. And lo and behold, the movie started playing! LOL. The movie is designed to stop playing when you push a key. And the program, at startup, thought all kinds of keys were being pressed (even though they weren't). Thus it was skipping the movie.

What's amusing about this is that I would never have thought to look at the keypress states in a million years to try to fix the movie player (the AVI player is horribly complex, and there are any number of places I would have messed around with the code before even considering it might be something else). If I hadn't noticed the edit boxes were malfunctioning, this would have been a bear of a bug to fix, heh.

Apparently my old compiler was zeroing those structures for me, which is an odd thing for it to have done (otherwise those edit boxes would NEVER have worked right, and the movie would NEVER have played at all). My new compiler was leaving them as garbage, which is what I would expect.

So anyway, there is one less known bug we will have in M4, which only leaves one more.

I do have release news for you guys, but it goes along with a couple of questions, so I'll write a different post on that later on today.