Ah...back to the ol' journal. It's been like a month since the last update! I've been working on the game the whole time...just on some of the less exciting parts like multiplayer issues and gameplay stuff. I've been spending a few hours in the gym every day striving for physical perfection, as well as playing ice hockey at the local rink and golfing whenever I get a chance...I'm really enjoying everything right now :-)

I've started working on a city editor, so I'll be keeping up with the journal again....at least for this part of the game's development. Over the next few entries I'll also talk about some of the other things I've added into the game over the last month.

The city editor is something that has been LONG overdue, it will add a lot of replay value (in terms of user created cities), and add years back on to my life :-) I can tell you trying to edit these cities using algorithms is NOT "good times".

I'm not throwing away all of my previous work in generating the cities, note the 'Auto Generate City' button in the screenshots, also random cities will still be a feature of the game. I've been working on the editor for about 8 hours....I'm about to call it a night. I'm going to pick up tommorow and hopefully wrap it up.



Here is how it started out earlier today...I got the windows in place as well as a grid. This editor is totally in-game and is accessable via the main menu. I'm going to encourage players to create their own cities, and I'm trying to make it as user friendly as possible.



I then started to fill in the two main windows with different options...



You'll be able to 'paint' roads, plazas, parks, etc. onto the map with relative ease...I wanted to have a 3D preview of your current brush, spinning in the Brush Selection window...so I had to setup a seperate viewport for that....



Then I started to get some roads into the editor...and started to work on making it so you can edit the city.



Aaaaand here's one more screenshots in fullscreen mode...it looks a lot sharper. I forgot to turn FSAA on, so there are a lot of jaggies. Note the shadows on the poles and stuff...I think I've finally got the shadow maps lookin' good enough for the final product.


Tommorow I'm going to add support for triggers, I'm going to make it so you can set objectives on the cities, and I'm going to add all kinds of other stuff in there.

This editor will do wonders for the game, now I can easily create non-uniform cities for the game, without having to write rediculously complex algorithms to do the same thing.

Alright...I'll see if I can squeeze a few more hours of work in before I gotta go to sleep :-) I'm hoping to have the game finished within the next week or so....wish me luck with that!

- Dan