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The Official 1.1 Progress Log

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Started 1 year ago by trevor
Latest reply from Kris015

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trevor
admin

That's not just an option in 1.1, it's the default. :)

I've mentioned before that the chief reason 1.0.x starts with a pre-generated world was because it was an entry in a "Procedurally Generated Game" contest. Now that that contest is over, there'll be a lot less stress on the game automatically generating stuff for you. (Though that'll always be an option).

This weekend, I've been working on interface issues. Number one on my list is that I don't like either of the toolbars. They're both too big and chunky and just get in the way far too much. So I've been working on whittling them down into something a little nicer. The top toolbar has now been split into two; one in the top left corner with subscriber information and time controls, and one in the top right corner with time and cash information. This frees up the top middle of the screen, which makes a really big difference, especially in widescreen aspect ratios.

I haven't toned down the left toolbar yet, but my current plan is to bevel the buttons a little (like the ones in the title screen in 1.0.x), so that they feel a bit less blocky, and to make the toolbar collapse when not in use. Also, I'm making the "active button highlight" less painful to look at.

Posted 1 year ago #
Street Wolf
Member

Great to hear it trevor. :)

Also, if I can throw my two cents in, I have a small idea for the UI that I think would be nice. On mousing over a button in the main menu, the button could light up and glow with the same blue color of the cursor and then fade back to it's standard green color. The same with the buttons in game, but opposite with colors (Normally blue, on mouse over, they glow green, then fade back to blue)

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

Feeling pretty blah today. But I did get a small bit of code written tonight. Developers now automatically move monsters away from roads, to make it safer for users to travel along the roads you place. (Wasn't quite feeling up to looking at UI toolbar code tonight. Maybe tomorrow)

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

I've been feeling mildly ill the last few days, so not too much work has actually gotten done. And I haven't really been posting with the progress which has been made.

But quick precis version: Devs now visibly carry monsters from place 'a' to place 'b'. They'll eventually do this for constructing/removing/moving buildings as well (it'll be a pretty trivial change to make this happen).

I've also made the change to make adventurers not use pathfinding when hunting or fighting monsters, and to recognise if they already have a path that gets them where they want to go. This should help with the pathfinding-related CPU loads of having lots of users at the higher time speeds.

Also a bunch of bug fixes, including saving/loading of the job queue, crashes if a user tried to perform pathfinding when no roads existed in the world, etc.

Posted 1 year ago #
Street Wolf
Member

A few teaser screenshots would be great to hold us over trev. ;)

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

I'll see what I can do. :)

But a lot of what's gone in has been motion and behaviour. Difficult to take a screenshot of pathfinding, after all.

I've been thinking about doing an interim release, with the updated rendering and map entity behaviour, but still keeping the overall 1.0.x game structure. But it'd possibly be a little tricky to actually do that, since everything's been a bit torn apart as I've been implementing bits of 1.1's structure. Especially in the UI. So this may not actually be possible, but I'd still really like to, since it's taking so long to actually reach 1.1. I mean, I've been working on 1.1 for almost twice as long as it took to implement 1.0 in the first place...

Posted 1 year ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

As long as it has glowing lines, I'm happy. Gotta love those graphics. ^^

Posted 1 year ago #
Street Wolf
Member

At this point, I wouldn't worry about another 1.0.x, just release 1.1 when you think it's ready. I don't think there's any rush you have to worry about. :)

Posted 1 year ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

Indeed. Have some coffee, eat some cake, then think about how awesome it is to have fans.

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

Slowly getting back to normal, and getting back to code.

Here's the latest stuff:

Fixed some broken pathfinding code which was leading to adventurers stepping off of the road for the last portion of their journey.

Fixed a crash bug if a MoveMonster dev job was pending across a save/load.

Camera now starts zoomed further out, and the camera status is saved across save/load.

Map regions now each keep separate lists of devs, players, and monsters, instead of mixing them all together into one big list. They're still all counted toward the 300 unit limit per region, but this change will make it a lot cheaper and easier to perform monster management tasks per region (such as adjusting or maintaining the number of monsters in each region, as the player adjusts that design parameter).

I'm also doing an awful lot of thinking about the overall UI system for 1.1. I'm thinking about having it work something like this:

At the start, you're looking at the full world map. Written just above the northern edge of the world map is the MMORPG name and a switch to take the MMO online or offline. You also have a toolbar window, which at this level shows your overall MMO reports and design settings (classes, etc)

You can click on any region to automatically zoom in to focus on that region, and turn the toolbar into the "Edit Region" toolbar (which contains the build buttons and other interfaces). You can then click outside the region to zoom back out to the world view (or double-click to focus on that other region), or can just use the old 'zoom out' scroll wheel interface instead, for the same purpose. While in this mode, the region name and stats are drawn in the top left corner of the region.

In the same way, you can click on a town to zoom in on it, and get the "Edit Town" toolbar (which contains quest customisation and other similar UI elements).

At any time, you can click on an adventurer or monster or developer, and that same side toolbar becomes the "Inspect" panel showing what they're doing.

And of course, you still have the right-drag, arrow keys, and scrollwheel navigation interface, which overrides all of this auto-navigation. But hopefully, it won't really be necessary any more.

Posted 1 year ago #
Street Wolf
Member

Good stuff trev. Will you still be able to right click and drag to move around like before, or will you be forced to zoom into particular things?

Also, have you considered radial menus? Like, at the world level of view, holding a click on a region displays a circular menu around it including options like "Shutdown Region" "Upgrade", etc. When you zoom into the region level of view, you can click on individual cities and do the same thing with them; hold the click, get a radial menu with different options (including "Edit" which zooms in closer still into the city and allows you to edit the buildings).

Anyway, still can't wait to see 1.1. It seems like it'll basically be a whole new game that just happens to have a similar concept to 1.0.x. :)

Posted 1 year ago #
Chii
Member

First off I want to say what a great game you've created and I can't wait to see v1.1

I'd love too see a new more compact UI as I often find it obstructs my view atm, simply removing it from view when not in use would work just as well. Radial menu's don't sound like a bad idea but I think I'd prefere using toolbars tbh.

Been reading around a bit and some of the ideas for this game are fantastic. For example I'd love to be able to block a regions wall so that players can't travel into the adjacant region, also the epic quests which could unlock certain areas on completion and boss monster placement will give much more depth to the game.

One thing I'd like to have a few more things implemented on is the character classes, simply increasing the variables to 1-10 for attk/def could be enough for me to be able to have a more varied class system (I couldn't think of a better way to expand on this currently >.<). As atm all i can do is have classes like this to keep it balanced: attack 5 def 1, 4/2, 3/3, 2/4 and 1/5. If I was to set the class system any different to that then certain classes would be OP.

Love your game and hope you keep up the good work Trevor :)

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

Today's work:

Developers now place and remove all monsters. Zone a region and your devs spring to work, placing monsters within that region (they drag the monsters in from the nearest respawn area). Unzone it and they spring to work dragging the monsters back off the map, again through the respawn area. They also do this when you change the number of monsters that should be in a zone. Currently, this is wired up to the "Monster Density" option in the "Design/General" dialog. But I'm thinking about changing this to a per-region value.

I also fixed a nasty, nasty movement bug which occasionally caused players and other map entities to stall, rather than ever actually reaching their destinations properly when running on the faster timescales. Or worse, strongly overshooting their destinations. This bug dates back to the 1.0.x series.

This was particularly bad with developers, as they were often dragging monsters into entirely the wrong places when the timescale was set to max (sometimes being dropped as much as two regions away from where the monsters were supposed to be dropped off!)

Also, thenks for the nice comments, guys! They always inspire me to get more work done. :)

Posted 1 year ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

Congratulations on fixing the movement bug. I don't know if it's related, but I've seen a rare bug (only happened twice so far), where, on the highest timescale setting, the players would end up shifting sides at a town. For example, at first they would be on the right, then to the left almost instantly, then right, etc..

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

Yup, that's exactly the bug I fixed last night, Meerkat. Very pleased to finally have found it!

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

4th September:

Boring debug stuff today.

I improved the error message used when a file cannot be opened (with proper English explanation of the message, for most likely error codes).

Under Win32, the game now opens a message box when it detects a problem, and that message box contains (hopefully) useful details about the error. The game then shuts down cleanly, after flushing its write buffers so we won't get any more truncated 'stdout' files where the error message hasn't been fully written out.

I've also dropped some small text files into the 'Preferences' and 'Saves' directories, explaining the purposes of those directories. This should stop the problem of certain zip programs (WinZip, most notably, apparently) not creating those directories while unzipping the game.

I've also also added a few logging functions which will send debugging text to stderr, instead of stdout. Nothing's using them yet, but I've been thinking about removing the output that's being sent to stdout right now; it kind of clutters up the directory, when nothing's gone wrong. Maybe better to just send errors to stderr, and ignore the informational text.

Also, I finally fixed the weird open-close-open of the main game window, when you start any VectorStorm game. It's not the best fix, but that flicker had been getting on my nerves. Now the window just opens and the game uses it. (The window still vanishes and reappears if you change video settings in mid-game, though. Still need to fix that.)

I promise I'll get back to actual game stuff soon. Really! :)

Posted 1 year ago #
Chii
Member

hehehe, all these things need ironing out too though. Really glad to see you keeping us up to date with what's going on, thanks! :)

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

6th September:

Painful back; no coding today.

7th September:

Back feeling much better. I've hooked up the map to draw the MMORPG name on the surface of the map, as well as a functional "player capacity" meter. The meter shows how many players your MMORPG can currently support, and how many are actually connected.

Additionally, the compass rose (which was previously just for a bit of colour) is now the switch which takes the whole MMORPG online or offline. When you click it, it initiates a rolling shutdown of all region servers, which kicks everyone offline.

Along the way, I made it possible to click on buttons and other UI-type items on the map (previously, they had to be in a UI layer, floating above the map), and fixed a number of bugs in the optimised rendering of map regions.

Posted 1 year ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

So is there any estimate on when it's released?

Posted 1 year ago #
trevor
admin

Estimate on when it'll be released? No, not at this stage; it'll be released after working through all the bugs which are turned up during beta testing. Unlike 1.0, 1.1 will go through a proper testing cycle to find bugs before having a general release.

Now, as for when it'll enter beta testing, that's quite another matter. :)

I'm going to be setting myself a deadline for getting MMORPG Tycoon 1.1 into public beta testing, the same way that I set deadlines for my "Game in a Week" games. I haven't picked a precise date yet, but it'll be some time in the first half of October. Probably either October 5th or 12th. I'll be announcing the exact date officially within a couple days, once I know the rest of my schedule through October.

Of course, anyone here on the forums will be able to beta test. The main blog page for MMORPG Tycoon will still point people to the 1.0.x version until 1.1 finishes testing, but I'll post a link to the beta version here on the forums. And with any luck, 1.1 won't need 16 revisions to get all its worst bugs out, the way that 1.0 did. ;)

Also, 8th September:

Quick and dirty first pass on "mountain range" graphics around the borders of regions, to denote edges that adventurers cannot cross (screenshot over on the main VectorStorm blog). Additionally, set up the adventurers to be unable to pass these borders, and for randomly generated quests to not try to send players across the borders. Next, I need to implement the "border crossing" building types so that the player can selectively allow his subscribers to move across into new regions.

Also, fixed up a few bugs in the "Capacity Meter" that I showed yesterday; it was calculating MMORPG capacity incorrectly. I'm not actually certain whether my new mechanism is ideal; it's exactly the correct number of players who can be in the MMORPG at the moment, but perhaps it fluctuates too much.

See, there may only be 300 entities in any region at once, and players, monsters, and developers all count toward that.. and that means that the player capacity of a newly activated region starts at 300, but swiftly drops as the developers enter the region to set it up, and then drops even further as the developers bring monsters in, so the 'maximum players' value isn't really as reliable a figure as people might expect it to be; without changing anything in the MMORPG, it'll fluctuate a bit as developers and monsters move around between the regions. I imagine that this capacity meter's functionality might change a bit as a result of beta test feedback. But for now, it works well enough for me to leave it alone and get on with more important stuff.

Posted 1 year ago #

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