Sadly there are no screenshots to show off this time. But this is mainly due to the fact that I’ve spent the most time on coding the game mechanics, so on the surface nothing has changed but the game is still on it’s track (actually I’m rather surprised at how fast I advance with all the things I have planned). And besides this due to a personal loss in my family I haven’t had that much time to code since my last update.
As for the game itself, I have continued coding on the army part. In addition to the last update you can now not only build units, but also manage armies and attach (and detach) the units you built to them, and you can also assign them to one of your regions. This is the second big step on the list for the army part of the game, with the next (and final) step being able to move them around and therefore also be able to attack the regions of your enemies. This’ll also be the next thing I’ll start working on.
Another thing I did was to write a little app to convert the different 3D file formats I was using (mostly .x) to my own binary file format. The main reson behind this is just speed. Loading the earth model for my current game (which has a lot of vertices, it’s no simple sphere, it has some light elevations) took around 300 ms (only loading, not creating the displaylists, and also without loading textures) when loaded with my ASCII-.X importer and with the new binary file format it only takes a mere 12 ms. So this is something that speeds up loading off the game very much, and since I later on need a lot of models (buildings, units, etc.) I really needed to do this. The app itself is very simple, you just load it up and drag the files you want to convert onto it and it does the rest for your. Plain and simple, but effective.
One more thing I found out recently : OpenGL’s selection mode is extremly slow with drivers from the 90 series on my GF6800. It took me some hours to realize that this was not my fault, and hopefully nvidia will fix this soon.