Game Development Status 3/10/06

Monthly Total about 5.5 hours; Yearly Total over 34 hours.

Last night I spent about 4 hours working first on UI cleanup, then on
importing the ADC Quatre Bras 2 map and countermix into a demo version
of the game.

The UI cleanup went very well.  I added menu items and toolbar buttons
for plotting movement, deleting the last plot action, and deleting the
entire movement plot for the selected unit.  I cleaned up the Units
menu  while I was doing this.  I also removed an extra Save Game
toolbar button, and moved another

The I worked on the QB2 map from the ADC2 module.  It's the same art
that we saw for the board game at Origins last year (though the
Origins art was a proof).  Awesome.  The full map is 42 Mb, so I
shrank it to 70 percent of its total size and got it down to 20 Mb –
this also makes the hexes roughly the same size we have now.  The full
size map is almost too large for the screen.  The best I could do was
display 10 hexes north-south and 22 hexes east-west on my laptop
running at a resolution of 1680 x 1050 with all the status display
windows closed.  The 70% map shows 11 hexes n-s by 32 e-w with the
displays open.

Click on the picture below for full size:



One major problem, though: the hexes are laid out in columns, not rows
(i.e. a hex side is at the top of the hex, not a vertex).  This will
require major retooling of the game to map properly; somewhere between
20 and 50 hours, because I don't know everything that might be
affected.  Once I do this, we'll be able to configure maps from the
database, and we'll be able to handle either kind of map, and
differing sizes of maps…we'll even have some of the work done towards
using different sized maps in the same game (large and small scenario
maps).

I'm going to ask Charlie what his priorities are…whether I should try
to work up a QB2 demo for the convention (which will take all the time
I have or more), or whether I should get back to the AI (which
probably won't be that much smarter by the convention).

Chris is on vacation in Florida; he tells me it will probably be the
end of the month before we have more Beta CDs.