Today’s went under the “Throw away old stuff” flag. Since the code is our property and art assets are mostly not, they all have to go. The process has started a few months ago already, but today it was mostly finished.
The game looks really empty at this stage. There are no replacements yet, except for a few elements. It is a fresh start, like an empty canvas ready to be filled with new stuff.
So what’s been thrown away – read under the cut:
Tileset surfaces got some improvements. Now they are stored in XML instead of hardcode (which allows for handy editing in a Notepad). Of course XML is slower to parse, but for development we need it to be easy to edit. Improving performance in a code that runs only once on game loading can be done much later 🙂
Second big improvement is a pop-up window that is instantiated by tileset surfaces class:
To be able to edit many of the settings in a developing game we need a tool that allows to see the changes live – and that’s the one. Pop-up is closely tied with it’s owner class, so no other element of the game is aware of its existence (that’s a good OOP approach). When changes are made in that window they trigger OnChanged event to which we connect the function to flush the caches and make the game recalculate tiles geometry (Surfaces affect that mostly). The pop-up looks and works exactly the same in the game as on this screen above.
In the future such pop-ups will carry the role of “on-the-fly” editing tools for the game. So e.g. UnitsTasks pop-up will allow to change settings such as work duration, produced ware count, etc.
3D models have many advantages over 2D sprites, (and drawbacks too), but when it comes to little details, 3D has a neat one – we can change how a unit model looks and that change is propagated throughout the game immediately. Take for example Serf, e.g. we want to give him a mustache – we change the 3D model, hit “reload resources” button, and voila – all serfs in the game have mustaches when walking any direction, carrying any ware, eating any food, just everywhere.
Spent a few hours on refactoring the code to modern Delphi standards. The language has noticeably improved in last decade. New iterators, generics, lambdas, other fancy buzzwords. It appears though, some of them are very handy and speedier!
Added a new section, there are few questions there yet, so feel free to ask what interests you in comments!
With this short note I’m going to start posting updates on project development, big and small.
Last week I was redoing the tile morpher algorithm (once again) and it seemed that this time it will finally work (not for the first time as well). I took a break after I could not figure a trivial math task – how to interpolate between sides of a square … was just too tired perhaps. Anyway, today I was formulating the problem once again, and simplest solution just popped into my head. So now tile morphing seems to be working nicely.
Couple more tests and related issue with mirroring height nailed as well. Quite a productive day I’d say:
Text is boring, how about some pictures?
Before touching anything I needed to tackle the biggest blocker of all – do I still remember 3D modelling and can I possibly make something good enough to be used in a game? At least Minecraft level.
Our main goal is to invent a new game that will be a spiritual successor to KaM. Bring it up to date with new gameplay mechanics and graphics. Where do we start?
It was middle of the autumn 2013 when we had another talk about starting something new. How come?
