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Moderator
of Candle'Bre
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Apr 1999
time: 17:04
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This thread will track my progress toward the release of the prototype, as discussed in another thread.
At present, the big project I've got going on in the prototype engine is the re-write of the way that provincial improvements are displayed.
Currently, we display provincial improvements by way of this funky formula that scatters them onto the province map.
That was good, especially when we only had six provinces of roughly the same size, cos it was fast.
But now that the prototype encompasses the whole of the Basin, the limitations of that formula are becoming pretty apparent.
One thing it does is that, oftentimes, when you build an improvement in one place, it "shows up" in some other province...usually on the border, so it's not off by much, but still...it's visually grating to me.
So...the solution is to go back in and manually set x,y coordinates for each building individually.
That's a wampum lotta buildings.
So that's what I'm doing right now.
I'm half done (30 of 60 provinces).
Well...not quite, cos I only have five of my six "level one" buildings so far....I still don't have markets in place, and we'll need them, 'specially when we get to the social dynamic piece, which is what I want to start playing with next.
So, for me, task wise, here's what's gotta happen before I'm ready to release the old gal to you guys to help me make sure that the social dynamic piece is a) fun, b) worth a hoot, and c) headed in the right direction:
1) Manually place the level one buildings (minus the markets) on the remaining 30 provinces (yuk!)
2) Add Markets...make sure they work the way they're supposed to, and then manually place THEM on the map (double yuk)
3) Gotta fix a couple of minor bugs with provinces that has been bugging me (long story...not worth repeating) - I kinna know what's wrong, but am not sure how long it'll take me to fix it....."shouldn't" be long, but....you know how that goes
4) Flip the switch to "turn on" the social dynamic model (the good news here is that about 80% of the new variables I'll need to track this stuff are already in place....the bad news is...since I've never flipped the switch yet, I have no idea if it's going to work, or if it's going to blow up spectacularly when I turn it all on for the first time).
5) Debug, and get it where it's working without blowing itself to Hades before handing it over.
So that's a lot of stuff.
Then, once I turn it over for review, I'll set about fixing some other stuff that's been bothering me (one of the cool things I'm going to try to fix is mouseover text...right now, especially when the seasons change, the text can be hard to read--white text on a snowy map background and all that), but I think I know how to make an "expandable" black rectangle that can grow or shrink to fit whatever text I write...in which case, the mouseover texts will always have a nice custom fitting black background, which sould solve the readabilitiy issue....no idea if it'll work like I'm hoping, but I'll be trying it next).
And then, we'll start compiling a list of the stuff you guys love/hate, and add that to the mix of stuff to work on....
-=Vel=-
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King
Nashville, TN
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Mar 1999
time: 11:04
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Ugg.. manually placing the improvements had gotta be a boring exercise.
Would there be any possibility of you finding a mathmetican (or even better, a topology guy) that could gin up an algorithm for placement?
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Moderator
of Candle'Bre
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Apr 1999
time: 17:04
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Mapped out the last fistful of scenes and completed three re-writes of the battle scene at the Gates of Brom, which is one of the pivotal late scenes in the book.
Good stuff, and moving on!
-=Vel=-
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