As you can see, the game is looking more and more finished with each new batch of screenshots. One thing you might notice is that I switched over to a different font compared to the older screenshots / videos. The main reason for this was that the old font, although it looked pretty nice and was fitting the game’s theme, didn’t include lowercase letters. Actually, the lowercase letters were just scaled-down versions of the uppercase letters. And so a forum user over at delphigl.com said that he found the text hard to read due to this, and after thinking about this, I realized that he was totally right. So I sat down almost a whole weekend and tried out dozens of different fonts until I found one that looked good, was easy on the eyes, easy to read, included all necessary characters (there are plenty of nice fonts that don’t have special chars, or lack certain chars) and also kinda fitted the game. So the new font should increas usability again, as it’s now much easier to read through longer text passages, and also looks kinda futuristic, perfectly fitting the games theme.

Other than moving over to the new font I also added a news ticker to the top bar, which shows all messages for the current turn and also marks them as read. Clicking on one of the messages will open up the corresponding window or region. It’s pretty much the same as the message list in the information center, but since that window is no longer shown at the start of a new turn (as it was the case in “Phase 1″), I decided to add this news ticker for people that don’t want to check the information center all the time. But if you don’t like it, it can be switched off in the nation-specific settings (so each player can decide this for himself). And while including this option, I also added other nation-specific UI options, like the scale of the flags on the globe.

So Projekt “W” is (slowly) crawling towards a release, step-by-step…

And last-but-not least a (positive) personal note : I recently got a new job as a software engineer pretty close to where I live. And believe it or not, we’re working with Delphi (XE2) there! So currently my daily routine looks like this : Get up, code on “Phase 2″, go to work, code with Delphi XE2 on work-related projects, get home, continue working on “Phase 2″. That’s what I call a nice change, especially compared to my last job.

So besides from putting finishing touches on the user interface, like the recent overhaul of the army management window (now finally including a separate window for assigning generals, much better than cramping that into the main window), I also wrote down my first ideas of implementing the politics section of the game. The image attached to this post shows the icon to open up the new politics window, and adding that feature will hopefully add some geopolitical aspects to the game. Though it’s in the early planning stages, I want to add some kind of “political avatar” for the player, attaching him even closer to the nation he’s leading. This will include some kind of popularity status (e.g. beloved, neutral, hated) that’ll have a direct influence on e.g. military and civil efficiency. In addition to that you’ll also be able to allocate budgets for certain areas, in both directions to either boost that area, or to save money, and those settings will have direct influence on your popularity amongst your people. I also plan to add different actions that you can initiate with your “political avatar”, like troop visits or image campaings, that’ll have direct influences though they’ll cost you a huge amount of money. But well, that’s only an early draft, so more on this once I finished the design of this new gameplay section.

Some of you using glCapsViewer to upload reports for the OpenGL hardware database weren’t actually able to do so, especially those that wanted to upload reports from work or other places that needed special proxy settings to connect online. So after several requests I’ve added a new proxy settings window to the glCapsViewer that should allow those folks behind a proxy to also upload their reports.

Note that I only updated the windows and linux versions, as an external person has to compile the Mac OS X release (thanks to Apple for not allowing me to compile for their OS from e.g. windows), so the Mac OS X version will follow soon.

Small update to 0.7a (3.March 2012) :
After installing the fresh released consumer preview of Windows 8 along with ATI’s new drivers with OpenGL support, I realized that glCapsViewer would report an empty OS string for Windows 8. So I updated it to 0.7a (Windows version only), so your Windows 8 OpenGL reports will now also report a correct OS string.

In addition to a new logo for glCapsViewer, I also worked on the database itself. Aside from fixing a problem with extension counts on the statistics page, making visual and practical changes to e.g. the report pages, I also added some features to the PHP-backed database :

• Supporting percentage for extensions on the statistics page
  A new column showing the percentage of reports supporting the given extension was added. So you can now quickly look up how common an extension is amongst the reports in the database. This could e.g. become handy if you want to implement a certain extension and need to estimate how common it is.
• Sorting options for the statistics page
  A pretty popular request, so here it is : You can now sort the list of extensions on the statistics page. Either by their name, or by their support percentage.
• Linkage of extension search
  I’ve also added the possibility to directly link to the result page of reports that support a given extension. So if you want to post a link to a list with reports that support a given extension on e.g. a forum, you can now easily put up a link and all those reports that support the given extension will be listed. A sample is this link for all reports supporting GL_AMD_PERFORMANCE_MONITOR. If you hover over the link you can see that you just pass the extension’s name to the listreports.php parameter called “listreportsbyextension”. I can imagine that this could become pretty handy in the future.
• OpenGL version statistics
  There is now an additional statistics page that shows the support for the different OpenGL versions. If you need to check how widely a certain OpenGL version is available, just take a look at this page.
• OpenGL hardware capability statistics
  I also decided to add the possibility to show all values for a given GL hardware capability among all reports. So if you e.g. need to know what 3D texture sizes are supported amongst the reports, you can easily do that now, e.g. via such a link, or by simply selecting that capability from either the list or a report itself. This should come in handy to see where hardware limitations are.

I’ve just got note that version 2.35 of the Newton Game Dynamics engine has been released, which is mainly a bugfix release as Julio is already working on a 3.00 release with lots of new features. And though I hardly get any time to do some coding I just took the time and updated the headers to the latest 2.35 (beta) release. As usual, you can grab them here.

So with that change of my whole personal situation I also don’t know when I’ll be able to continue work on “Phase 2″. Actually before the above mentioned stuff happened I was on track to releasing a beta-version to the public in january/february on which I wanted to base several releases upon for better feedback, balancing and bug fixing. But now that I’ll have to take care of a lot of important real-life related issues I sadly can’t tell when I’ll be able to continue working on “Phase 2″. But rest assured, I want to finish it, as I’ve put so much work into it over the last few years and also as the current build on my HD is looking pretty good.

Here are two recent (roughly two weeks old) screenshots of the current build :

As you can see I changed the main user interface again, but only a bit, as it was necessary due to a new game are for “politics”, and also because the old tabs didn’t stand out enough to make navigation easy enough. So with the recent change (only took a few hours) and the new icons the main UI looks a lot like the main menu and is very easy to navigate with the different icons easy to distinguish. The second shot shows some changes to the visuals of several windows, with the icons for different technology / unit types now colored different, a new functionality of the interacitve iconbox UI element used to navigate those windows.

With this in mind it’s possible that there won’t be any news for january and february, so don’t worry if it’s becoming a bit silent over here.

So that’s it for 2011, a year to forget…

As you can see I (once again) redid the whole user interface. Some may think I’m nuts when it comes down to the UI, with having at least half a dozen complete changes to it, but this time I actually had a good reason. You may remember the last arc-shaped user interface that looked just great? The looks sadly couldn’t cover all the problems that design had, so I decided to throw it away in favour of something far more simple. The last design looked good, but wasted a lot of screenspace due to it’s arc shape and also was only able to display one single window at a time, resulting in a very bad and annoying workflow, especially after longer periods of play.
One good example was the new region list, a window with all regions in your posession. Clicking on one of them brings up that region, and in the arc design this caused the region list to disappear due to the nature of that user interface, making regular tasks like managing your reasons very tiresome. With the new design, which is kinda back to the roots it’s now (again) possible to have several windows open. So if you look at the video you’ll see what I mean. You can now have the region list to the left and the region’s window on the right and quickly switch through all your regions and manage them, a perfect workflow.
But that’s not all, as the new design also offers a lot more space for the different windows. The old arc design wasted a lot of space and made it especially hard to display windows with lots of information, like the espionage one. So with this radical different design I’ve got much more space to display important information, increasing usability even more.

And (as also shown in the video) I also redid the main menu, endgame screen and battlefield user interface, so that the game’s user interface now looks seamless. That’s something I’ve been wanting from the very beginning of the development on “Phase 2″‘, but never really achieved with the old user interface designs. But now the game truly feels like it’s made from one piece, especially with the new icons that I created in my 3D modeller.

But it won’t stop here. I did a lot of things behind the scenes to get into a state where I can release at least a beta, though I’m not sure if this will happen 2011, with 2012 being more likely. For example the performance of the user interface was never that good, and now with the possibility to (again) have multiple windows open at the same time I realized that the UI was performing really bad. So I spent weeks optimizing it, taking away a huge part of the CPU limitation that was caused by the user interface. Now many items are rendered via vertex arrays, texture IDs are cached, hit tests are optimized and much more, resulting in roughly 200% performance increase for the user interface.

You can grab the Mac OS X port at the glCapsViewer project page. Also note that the OpenGL capability database now has it’s own subdomain, so if you want to link to it use this URL.

Note that I have migrated the old XML-reports into the new database, so if you already uploaded them with one of the old versions there is no need to re-upload. As usual you can access the database here.

Back in the days (several years ag)o Tom Nyudens from delphi3d.net (don’t go there, it’s no longer online) had a tool that read out an OpenGL’s implementation details (extensions, max values, etc.) and would store them online so every developer could go there and check what graphics card had which OpenGL capabilites. But sadly that tool along with the database went off when the site went down long time ago.

So I decided to end this deficit by creating such a tool by myself, simply named glCapsViewer. It doesn’t only read out all important OpenGL implementation details but is also able to upload them to a preliminary “database”, so developers can easily check out OpenGL implementation properties online. You can check out the preliminary database over here (not much in there yet, but that’ll hopefully change soon). Feel free to upload your own reports (but please for real hardware only, no need to upload a report for e.g. virtual box GL implementations or MESA) but note that I plan on doing a real database (the current one is just a list generated by the XML reports that have been uploaded) so at some point that database may be wiped (though I hope to integrate the files into the new one instead, only if possible).

An yes, some may have noticed that I actually uploaded a first version of it (created in Delphi) some days ago but decided to wait before announcing it to the public until I added another platform, and that’s what I just did, so here is the official announcement. I ported it over to Lazarus (and FPC), installed ubuntu in a virtual box and created a linux port too. So now you can upload reports from Windows and Linux (i386), other plattforms (like Mac OS) may also become available in the future, but don’t count on it. And yes, this is a first for me after ~20 years of coding, my first own application with a linux port. So now that a lot of people asked for linux versions of the apps/demos/games I did hopefully a lot of linux reports will be uploaded.