Good Progress

So I know it's been a while since I've updated this blog but I have a lot to say about the game.

First of all, I don't know if I've said this before or not but we have a working title for the game and it is called Valors End. This was thought up by Reds so I get no credit for that. I've also gotten myself a job at a real game development company. I now work for Silicon Knights on a project I am not allowed to talk about. I think this will be a great experience for me and will also put some money back in my pocket.

In terms of the game, I've made some good progress. I have changed a lot of the code so it is all very generic now. The behaviour of the Lizard Grunt is actually about a 100 line source file. It will obviously grow as time goes on but to get a unit that can attack and move around is fairly easy. I have some work to do on the pathing to take into account the size of the object and that sort of thing. A lot of the work that I've been doing is behind the scenes code refactoring. I've abstracted out a TON of the code so there is a lot of reuse going on now and a very easy to work with hierarchy.

In terms of functional features, I've added a lot. And I mean a lot. The first thing that I added that is the most obvious would be a GUI. It's just a placeholder until Reds comes up with something better (after I explain how the GUI stuff works to him which I still haven't done..). On the bottom left side of it is a nice little minimap which has the terrain on it as well as the fog of war. Units show up in here as their respective team colours if they are visible. Hidden units don't show up here. So far it works perfectly which is great. I haven't added the ability to scroll around on it yet or a rectangular outline showing you what you can see in the main window but I'll get there.

The middle part of the UI shows portraits (again just place holders) of the units that you currently have selected. It'll display up to 12 icons but since the code was well done, it will be easy to change that to support stacks or whatever other organization we come up with.

The right side shows the "action sheet" of whatever you have selected. So if you have a Lizard Grunt selected, he'll have the Attack, Move, and Stop commands available to him (that's all I have right now but there will be more). These are basically the orders that you can issue to a Unit or a Building which could also be mapped to a hotkey.

And yes, I did say Buildings. I have a hatchery up and running which is still a work in progress as far as the texturing is concerned. You can select a building and it's action sheet will be displayed and you can queue up a lizard grunt which will get produced every 2 seconds. I don't have a progress bar yet for this but it's on my task list, along with 50 other things. Because of the way I've developed the code, it's really easy to actually "rig" up a new building type and get it's action sheet up and running. Hotkeys are also going to be really easy to map to specific functions as well. This should hopefully mean that in order to create a new building, once the modelling is done, it'll take me an hour or two to get it fully working and integrated into the game.

The Units themselves now have a proper range as well as some more advanced animation selection. The lizards run towards each other in their "chasing" animation and then once they are close enough, they play their attacking animations. I still have to abstract out how this is done as it's just a big switch statement right now based on the movement status of the unit. Once that's done, it'll simply be a matter of specifying which animation gets played when the attack sequence begins.

The code has been optimized a wee bit as well and now runs faster which is always great news. I have a lot of places where I know that I can easily optimize things fairly easily so I might work on some of that in my spare time.

The current thing I've been playing around with has been steering behaviours to keep the units from penetrating each other. At the very minimum side of the scale, I would like units to stop and let others move around them without contact. More advanced functionality would be for units to side step eachother if possible while continuing their motion. I think this would add a lot of visual appeal to the game. This is a long long term goal so it'll be something I'll be continuously tinkering with but will mostly leave disabled until it's at a reasonable state.

I reworked the Unit and Building classes and came up with a generic Actor class which as a lot of the properties that are common to things that will be in the levels. I am going to most likely abstract the combat related elements either into a CombatActor class or as a CombatProperties (or similar) class which will be contained by Actors. I think this is most likely the easiest solution since I can still query every Actor to determine if it has a CombatProperties class and then perform combat related stuff on that. This will allow me to work at a high level but I will only pay 4 bytes per Actor that doesn't have the CombatProperties (just a NULL pointer). This is ideal instead of building it all into the Actor class which would result in one hell of a bloated class.

I've reduced ALL of the memory leaks in the program (there were only a few.. I mean like 200 bytes or so) but I've tracked those down and am now leak free which is always nice.

In terms of how clean my code is and how easy it is to integrate new stuff with, I'd have to say that I am in an ideal solution. It's all *very* clean and easy to read, as Reds commented on when he saw it, as well as fairly consistently commented. One of my on going goals right now is to get all the functions and classes commented properly. I'd say I'm about 80% of the way there which is great. I am using a tool called Doxygen which automatically generates a set of API documentation pages in any format I want. They come in handy.

I also got a new laptop from Dell which is a powerhouse little machine. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.9Ghz each. It's got 1 gig of RAM with an nVidia GeForce 7400 Go with 256 dedicated RAM. I have a 100 Gb hard drive spinning at 7,200 RPM (regular desktop speed... normal laptop drives spin at either 4,200 or 5,400 RPM which is a lot slower). I have a built in DVD re-writer which does ALL available DVDs. Built in wireless, lan, video out, s-video out, 4 USB ports, dual headphone jacks, etc. I also have a built-in webcam which is probably one of the best webcams I've ever seen. The awesome thing about it all is that it's all in a tiny form factor. It's a 12" screen which means I can take it with me everywhere. I can open it up and push it all the way back when I'm on the bus which is amazing since I travel every weekend for about 8 hours. That's a lot of time to be coding.

I'm going to wrap up this mega-post right now. I'll post some more in a few days, after I talk with Reds. We are both in communication through MSN now which will allow us to talk on a regular basis. We were using IRC before and I had a habit of not opening it up. With MSN, we can chat at our leisure which is awesome.

I'm outta here to work on more code (there are more changes I want to write about in the next post).

Shawn