Wednesday, Feb 1

Okay so today I finished debugging and implementing the two new game modes Domination and Equilibrium. Both work awesome, although they aren't fully fully tested - like I didn't use any special systems in the testing of Equilibrium, so there may still be some scoring issues there. I probably should have tested that myself since it would be hard during a game to actually see whether the right amount of points are being tallied. I'll do it tomorrow - already shut down Codeweaver and all that crap and don't feel like loading it all back up again. *makes note on whiteboard* I love having this thing, use it so much. Speaking of scoring, I placed the values for each score event in the game in the database so that during play testing my designer or whoever else can change the score values in the DB text file without having to bug me about changing them in code. Yey. I also did what I said I was going to do yesterday, which was change the victory condition in Domination mode to count only systems, not total planets. Easily reversible tho should the team cry foul on that design decision on my behalf.

In addition to the two new game modes I added a graceful handling of maps being deleted outside the game, or getting corrupted. The DB holds the name and size of every map created in/for the game. When you cycle through maps in the games mini-conquest setup menu you're actually cycling through database entries, not the actual map files themselves. There fore the game can't tell if a map file has been deleted until it tries to load it from disk. In the event that it can't load the map it displays an error dialog and then asks if the user would like to delete the map, which removes its DB entry so you can't select it anymore. The user can say no in case he actually moved the map file somplace and forgot to put it back - or something like that. I plan to add a Delete button in the Game Editor that lets the user delete maps on their own as well. But that's not high on my list of priorities.

So if I keep up this pace I'll pretty much have my feature-complete game by the weekend. No shit? Craziness. I thought for sure it would take me longer to get to where I am now. Guess that says something for T2D. All I have left to do is Imperialism mode and Blitzkreig mode. Imperialism will be more work than Blitzkreig, because all Blitzkreig is is one of the other 4 modes with a 2min game timer and 5sec turn timer set by default. After that I get to start thinking about how the hell I'm going to do the AI for this game. I have some ideas but I'll need to experiment.

K enough for now, off to bed with me...