Editor and debugging

So I've started work on an editor. I'm using .NET and C++ to get the editor done. I'm using .NET because it seems to have a TON of features for UI development which are all very easy to use and are all garbage collected for me. I'm still going to try to maintain proper memory practices but if I miss something, it won't be as big of a deal as it would be in the game so I can let the GC worry about it. Also, having a designer in Visual Studio will come in damn handy when I'm making some of the manager windows. Right now, I have Ogre rendering into a form as well as a "viewport manager" which has a ton of customizable arrangements. I have every combination possible with a 2x2 grid. You can have one stretched across the top, and two in the bottom row. There are 8 different combinations that are possible and they all work.

I haven't hooked up buttons or anything to it yet so it's just a hard coded enumeration but I'm taking it slow and making sure each feature works and is cleaning done before I move on. The aspect ratio in the viewports isn't re-adjusted if the size changes so ignore the stretching in any shots until I implement this (which will be soon)

One feature that was needed for both in-game and the editor was a bounding box that had a transparent material over top of it so you could actually see the bounds that it enclosed. This isn't as big of a deal for small bounding boxes but the larger they are, the more useless a wire frame view of it becomes, especially when you're scene is littered with hundreds of them. In the editor, you'll be able to turn on/off certain volumes to keep speed reasonable since they are transparent but they'll show up in different colours so you can leave all the ones on that are relative to what you are doing and turn the others off. They look kind of nice actually. The colours are just in a script file so they can be changed (read: should be changed).

David Copperfield Styles

I suck at art. I suck at all things that require artistic ability. With that said, I created a magician unit. It's just a test unit for now but I am going to use him to develop the spell system. The first spell I've worked on is the magic missile spell. It sucks. It needs improvement but the logic of it works.

I think it is about time that I start to abstract the AI state machine into script files. It should be really easy to allow which AI states are supported by each unit type as well as the priority of them. I'll add per-state customizations to the script file eventually so you can change timer rates and other such things. For now, you should be able to create an entire machine in the script file that will support a hierarchy and priorities for states at the same level. All the states will be defined in code but they are easy to create. Hopefully this will allow rapid development of units when we get some art for the different units.

There are some other improvements in the UI like a population bar at the top. The map parser has had some improvements as well in that an entire map can be defined in script except for resource providers. I'll add those soon.

Yes, I know the minimap isn't visible. I am trying something with it right now.

I'm (almost) a real game now Geppetto

So. What's new. Well, lots of stuff. So let me try and give a list of all the things I've done since my last update (this is entirely incomplete but it's the most obviously, visible changes):

• Resource Harvesting -- Units walk back and forth from the "gold mine" to the closest building and you get 25 wood each time
  
  
• Building Placement -- Once you have 250 wood, you can place down a building. It will show up in red over areas that you can't place it and green in places where you can.
  
  
• Path smoothing -- The path finding generated pretty rough paths so they've been smoothed out to straight lines across the grid where possible (red lines are the new path, green lines are the original unsmoothed ones)
  
  
• Selection Area -- The selection area now has a nice translucent rectangle filling it in. I think it looks nice although I'll let Doug tweak the colors and such :)
  
  
• Fighting -- The units fight each other with their swords. They chase down units and instead of firing those awesome black squares that you see in previous shots, they swing their swords at each other. I'm going to add callbacks into the animation system to be fired off at certain times so we can assign damage at the correct time in the animation
  
  
• Minimap -- There's an almost fully functional minimap. I have to add code to handle when the user clicks and drags in there to move the actual camera to that location but other than that, it shows all units in the right team colors as well as showing your current selection in yellow
  
  
• Group Management -- You can bind various groups to hotkeys now. This works in the same way Ctrl-1 and similar do in other RTS games
  
  
• Awesomely clean code and design -- It's so damn easy to drop stuff in the game now. The design has worked out very well.
  
  
• Debugging Features -- We've got a few shapes that we can attach to the various actors in the system. Currently, there is support for cylinders, 2D circles, 3D rectangles, and text labels. The AI states are being printed out into the text label
  
  
• Pluggable AI System -- The AI was implemented using a heirarchical state machine with each state responsible for determining when it can activate. This has been amazing to use since we can drop new states in and not screw up existing states. Currently, I have the following states: Idle, Walk, Combat, Harvest, Construction, Search and Destroy
  
  
• Building Attacking -- You can attack buildings now and when they die, they will "rumble" into the floor. I'll replace this with a collapse animation once we have those from Doug but he's got a lot of work on his own to be doing so that might be a while off.
  
  
• Unit Avoidance -- I have started working on keeping Units from penetrating through each other and it's working out in very simple cases. I've got more work to do on it but they don't penetrate at all right now. I'll probably easy up on this later once I get into handling it better. For the most part, it's a good start.

I think once I get some computer AI in there, it'll almost feel like it's becoming a real game. I am not sure how I'm going to tackle that beast yet but hopefully I can get a very basic AI up within the next 6 months. I've got some friends back at school who are interested in creating some AI so maybe I'll let them have a good at it.

There have been a *ton* of under the hood changes and I support a lot more "features" like Actor Attachments which are very simple peices that can be put on an Actor itself. The shield, sword, and shoulder component of the lizard grunt are all Actor Attachments. It's an easy way to have custom pieces but still attach them to whatever in a very generic way.

There are still no memory leaks and only a few bugs which I know about but just haven't fixed. Other than those bugs, most of which are new, the game is pretty rock solid which I am happy about.

Anyways. I'm going to get back to work. I promise more updates more often but here are some currently pics until then. (I think I'll post a video or two soon as well)