It's looking and sounding excellent, I can't wait to try it.
The Official 1.1 Progress Log
(152 posts) (13 voices)-
9th September, 2008:
Implemented first pass of the new mouse navigation interface for 1.1, which I discussed a while back. From the full map view, you click on a region to zoom in on it, then click outside the region to zoom back out to the map view.
You can still do all the same free zooming/scrolling you used in the 1.0.x series; this is just an extra option for rapid navigation around the map. I actually far prefer it over the old system; surprised me how much better it is! There's still a little work to be done about the precise interface to be used to zoom back out to the map view; often, it really feels like clicking on an adjacent region should focus on that other region, instead of zipping back out to the map view. But this is definitely moving in the right direction, I'd say. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
10th September:
Was feeling less creative today, so spent my time fixing a few bugs.
The most notable fixes from today:
Adjusted the region autozoom interface (mentioned yesterday), to make it work more intuitively. Now, when you're focused on a region, clicking on a non-focused region switches the focus to that other region, instead of popping you back out to the full map view. To zoom back out to the full map view, you now click anywhere near an edge of the screen. I like this approach a lot more.
Fixed the autozoom to frame regions more precisely in the available space. TODO: Fix autozoom so it won't zoom in close enough for parts of the focused region to be obscured by the side toolbar.
Fixed the spline roads to adapt to new road placements in realtime, while you're placing new roads. (Previously, the road network splines were only recalculated after you finished the "place new road" step). This means that you can see exactly the final road layout that you'll end up with if you release the mouse button during road creation. (TODO: It still only does this new road previewing for roads connected to the building you're dragging the road from, not for ones you're dragging to; need to fix that. Also TODO: Make sure that the pathfinder won't try to generate a path that traverses a road which you're midway through creating! Also also TODO: must stop roads from being placed across region borders; there'll be a special building type for doing that, which will also let me do some neat optimisations to the pathfinding, to better support high server populations.)
Posted 1 year ago # -
15th September:
Real-life stuff has been really busy since the last update, and I've done very little MMORPG Tycoon work at all in that time, unfortunately.
Most of what I've done has just been reorganisation of the source code. MMORPG Tycoon is by far the largest and most complicated of the VectorStorm games. To give a general idea of the scope, "Petition Damsel" contained about ten source code files, not counting the core VectorStorm game library. By comparison, MMORPG Tycoon has over eighty. And many of them have far too many things in them.
For example, one of these source files was called "ToolbarLeft.cpp", and contained the code for the left-side toolbar from MMORPG Tycoon's 1.0.x series, and for virtually all of the buttons, build tools, and etc. which were contained in that toolbar. Anyhow, "ToolbarLeft" had become huge and unwieldy, and I've finally gotten around to neatening it all up a bit.
I also have done a bunch of tuning to the graphics; the distances at which particular map features become visible/not visible, and things of that sort. But not a lot actually new to talk about. Hopefully more of that sort of thing in the next few days; I'm hoping that I'll have more time available again soon!
Posted 1 year ago # -
The last couple days:
I've been making slow progress on the updated user interface for 1.1.
In its current revision, there are three levels of UI, determined by your level of zoom on the map. When fully zoomed out, you have the 'Reports', 'Design', and 'Business' options available; basically, the global settings and the "current status" data. Additionally, you have access to the Zoning interface from 1.0.x.
Zoom in closer (or click on any region), and you gain access to the new "Region" pane. The region pane lets you adjust the level set on the currently active region, lets you place towns and roads inside it, etc.
Zoom in even closer still (or click on a town), and you get access to the townbuilding placement pane, which lets you place individual townbuildings inside towns.
TODO: The toolbar where all this info and options are displayed will probably have to be a lot bigger than it is now; I'm going to want to be able to display a lot more information in it, and with the glowy vector font, small text can be very difficult to read.. will probably take a lot of fussing around to make it work well.
Posted 1 year ago # -
September 18th:
Massive refactoring of UI button code; probably removed about 80% of the button setup code in the project. This refactoring makes it heaps easier to add new buttons, and to universally modify the appearance of buttons throughout the game.
More fixes to the new 1.1 UI model; the "Design", "Reports", and "Business" pages all now fully work, and work properly in concert with manual zooming in/out.
When focused on a region, that region now draws its own server capacity meter. (Currently, the meter appears in the center of the region. TODO: Put it in the top left corner. Experiment with making it a constant size on screen, rather than scaling as you zoom in and out of the map)
Finally, I think I've cracked the problem of how to present all the necessary information in this UI, without dramatically increasing the size of the fixed on-screen toolbars. So there should be some dramatic improvements visible over the weekend. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
September 20, 21:
Well, this isn't entirely what I wanted to post today, but..
I've been making huge changes to the MMORPG Tycoon source code this weekend, but.. sadly, virtually none of the changes are visible to the end-user; the changes were almost all about reorganising code.
Up until this point, I've had the code for MMORPG Tycoon organised approximately like the code for the other VectorStorm games (ie: not organised at all). This is fine when you have a game with five or ten source files, but for a game the size of MMORPG Tycoon, it really starts making it difficult to find the particular bit of code that you're looking for. So I've spent a lot of time this weekend organising code, putting source files into subdirectories, breaking up source files which contained dozens of classes, etc. After all this work, I'm liking the code an awful lot more.
Now, it's not all been under-the-hood maintenance. One new feature I've added is the ability for the left toolbar to grow or shrink, to fit its contents. This means that the toolbar no longer has to always be big enough to contain the largest UI items that will be placed inside it, and so it's now usually a lot smaller than it was in the 1.0.x series.
...and there are a few other little things too, but I'll leave those as surprises for now. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
September 22nd:
More big progress on that left toolbar; I'm now pretty happy with its general behaviour, switching between modes and focuses and all that.
New functionality today; the "Inspect" tool is now totally gone. Instead of needing to activate that tool, now you can just click on a player or a monster or whatever at any time, and it'll automatically inspect that entity. The inspect data now shows up inside the left toolbar (which now expands, to give more space for data). This gives the space that will be needed to show information about players' parties, guilds, inventories, and all the other new player data that's being added in 1.1. Eventually, this simplified "Inspect" mechanism will be expanded to work in the same manner for buildings.
Today is also notable in that this is the first day in 1.1 development in which everything you could do in 1.0.x is fully functional in 1.1 as well.
Also, I've been thinking about actually bumping the version number to 1.5 or 2.0 when this is all finished, to reflect how much of a bump over version 1.0 this is going to be. I'm not sure that "It's 0.1 more than the last release" gives the right impression about just how much has been going on during development. But that's just semantics, and I'm not going to spend too much time thinking about it right now. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Anonymous
UnregisteredOoh, inventory info! Does that mean you see every item in it or just stats like max space, used space, etc?
Posted 1 year ago # -
September 23rd, 2008:
Wow, I've had a whole bunch of boring entries lately. And today's the worst. (Important, but amazingly boring)
Today I modified my memory allocator to make it substantially faster.
<technical details that you don't care about>
One of the nice things about the VectorStorm games is that they pre-allocate a chunk of memory to use when they start up, and so no matter what, they'll never use more memory than that initial block of memory, so even if you play for days and days, you'll never find a memory leak in them the way you do in many other applications. On the development side, this approach to memory management also lets me validate that I'm not corrupting memory, that I've not forgotten to free blocks of memory, etc. There are all sorts of benefits both to me and to players, for using my custom memory solution.Anyhow. The downside of all this was that my memory allocator was horrendously slow. In the early VectorStorm days this wasn't a big problem, because none of the games used much memory (typically 8 megabytes or less). But in MMORPG Tycoon I've needed to dramatically increase the amount of memory being handled by the system, and the memory allocator just has become slower and slower as it's been given more and more memory to deal with.
You've seen this for yourself in the 1.0.x builds, where when you start loading a game, the whole game freezes up for about a second or so; that frozen time is almost entirely being spent just allocating hundreds of thousands of tiny blocks of memory; graphics, player data, MMORPG data, etc. The memory allocator was also responsible for some frame rate hiccups during the game itself (though nothing as dramatic as that initial freeze when entering the game from the main menu).
With this reworking of the code, the allocator is now many orders of magnitude faster; to the point where that lengthy freeze when loading a saved game now takes perhaps a tenth of a second to complete, and an occasional memory alloc or free during gameplay shouldn't make the game go quite as stuttery as it did before.
</technical details that you don't care about>And to keep from putting all the non-programmers entirely to sleep (if it's not already too late), yes, the "inspect" view will show precisely what items an inspected adventurer is carrying, but it won't be an inventory matrix as you see in games like Diablo or WoW; the current plan is that adventurers will carry one weapon, one piece of armour, healing items, money, and may also carry "quest tokens" if they're on a quest, and all of this will be shown in simple text.
Note that I haven't actually implemented any of that inventory functionality yet; all that's actually finished right now is making room to display it in the UI. But I expect that that'll be next; adding the inventory to adventurers, and then having monster drops provide loot, and then adding shops where adventurers can purchase upgraded weapons.
I'll also need to modify the combat algorithms so that weapons and armour are taken into account. That'll take a little thought, since it doesn't fit very well with my current City of Heroes-based simple combat rules. But I'm sure I'll work out something that isn't too tricky. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Aeon
MemberI'm assuming at some point when the whole inventory/drops/shops thing gets implemented that we'll get some control over the equipment, at least in names? I'm wondering how much control you'd actually provide though? Name, power and cost? It would be fun to populate the shops in each town and decide which items certain monsters drop (and what % chance of dropping them!), maybe which dungeons reward which items, etc...
Of course, you might overwhelm the new people, but so it goes. If you make all that equipment strictly optional unless the player adds or generates it in, that would probably work better for starters. Everybody can run around naked unless they visit the shop that sells the armor and clothes, especially if that shop isn't in the newbie zone.
Posted 1 year ago # -
It's safe to assume that when the whole inventory/drops/shops thing gets implemented, that players will have complete control over the equipment available. This all ties into two major new systems set to appear in MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, which I haven't talked about yet. ;)
And no, I'm taking steps to ensure that it can't overwhelm new players. I'll start talking about all of that sometime in the next week or so, once I've started implementing these new systems.
Posted 1 year ago # -
September 24th:
Fixed an occasional crash if one clicked on the map outside of any of the map regions (over the ocean, near the compass rose, etc)
Added a "Back" button to the Inspect toolbar pane.
Stopped adventurers from attacking monsters that the devs are moving within a map region (oops! Devs importing monsters from respawn points were causing large numbers of recently-respawned adventurers to chase after them)
And the big new addition for the day.. adventurers now have an inventory of up to five items. They don't yet actually pick items up or buy/sell them or anything, but they do now have an inventory where they can store them. It's the first step toward game-economy. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Anonymous
Unregistered"(oops! Devs importing monsters from respawn points were causing large numbers of recently-respawned adventurers to chase after them)"
"The developers are bringing them in... They must be blessed! KILL THEM AND FEAST ON THEIR FLESH! CHAAARGE!"
I have no idea why I thought of that. Would go well with some events though, like a big party or something with quests for everyone. A Harvest. Like Brewfest and Darkmoon Faire in World of Warcraft.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Aeon
MemberOnce control of the names and equipment is available, I wonder how possible it would be to control the theme of the world. I mean, suppose you wanted to make the it into a space MMORPG where all the players are ships and the roads are star-lanes, the towns are space stations and the planets are dungeons?
Or maybe a world where all of the players are driving around big rovers and can upgrade them to help ward off those crazy road pirates (which sounds like a really corny post-apocalyptic movie). That would be fun.
Anyway, just hoping things stay abstract enough to make this possible, although I understand that one has to pick SOMETHING to represent various elements in the world.
Posted 1 year ago #
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