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)