I would have updated my blog earlier, but work on PjW has been very fluent since the last updates, and I really got a lot of stuff done over the last weeks, though much of it was behind the scenes and can’t be really shown via screenshots. But let’s begin with the things I did that I can actually show with some nice pictures!
Number one : I pushed myself to finally start modelling some of the buildings (after finishing the list of buildings to be in the game, except for some special/military buildings). On your left you’ll see a shot of the first e
ight buildings I did over the last two days, and I’m quite content with them.
They’re detailed enough to look good and don’t have too many triangles for the rather small windows they’re displayed in. When creating such buildings you’ll always have to find a good compromise between the number of triangles (it’s no ego-shooter where you walk around in those buildings) and giving them a look that the player is easily able to recognize. But since this isn’t the first strategy game I’m modelling buildings for I don’t think that this matter will trouble me, the only problem on this part of content creation is the ideas you need for your buildings. For the ones that are from our present time it’s easy, as you know how they look. But since there’ll also be some futuristic buildings in the game it’s not always easy to get a good idea on the lookings of a new building.
Number two : More work on the region’s detail window. You already saw my new design of that window in the last posting and I’ve put some more work into it. As you can see on the shot it shows a region where I already constructed some buildings, and one of the new features is that small info hover that tells you informations about the building currently under your cursor (sadly the screencapture doesn’t include a mouse cursor, so just image it above that box). This way the player can always see what the building actually does. And this leads to the next thing I implemented : Building effects. I already wrote some time ago that you can set a script for each building that get’s executed each round (and additionally one that is exectued when the building is finished) and the effects you can see in both windows are taken directly out of that script. So each building affects different values of your region (some also affect global values), which after ending your turn are taken into account when calculating the regions final values. So as of now the whole building thing is in terms of coding almost finished and ready to use.
Number three : The rest of my time on this project went into a lot of different things, mostly under the hood, so you can’t see them on the screenshots. I made some additions to WeltEdit, so you now have an instant 3D preview of buildings, and I changed a lot of things concerning the usability of this main tool for PjW. And I also spent a lot of time changing (minor) things of the GUI, mainly in terms of usability too (scrolling of listboxes, showing selected items, etc.) and also fixing some smaller bugs (e.g. buttons where highlighted, even if another window covered them). I then also spent some time on the game design document and started gathering some ideas for the first multiplayer mode I’ll implement, namely the hot-seat mode, where up to five players can play on one PC, round after round. This mode will also allow you to have the AI control some of the nations.
Big posting this time, but work is really coming along, and I even didn’t told you everything I added to the game. So stay tuned for more…