Contrary to the last few weeks I spent most of my time last days with coding on the game, rather than making content or game design :
The research feature I showed off in the last posting is now finished and you can already research your way through the (right now very small) technology tree and stuff like new buildings and technologies are unlocked along the way of your research. There is now also a nice preview image for eacht technology, though I initially wanted to also include a 3D view (like with buildings and units) I decided for just an image that I’ll prerender. I mainly opted for this route because otherwise I would have to do additional 3D models for technologies with having low polycount and rendering speed in mind. And as another part of the research feature I also added a separate window for research history, so you have a place where you can browse through the technologies you already invented and see what they unlocked. Though this is no necessartiy nor very important to gameplay, I think some players will still find this feature interesting.
Once again I also had to fiddle around with the army management feature (or better said : window) of the game. Although the feature itself was finished (well, except for some small bugs/inconsistencies I recently fixed) the window that you used to manage your divisions (I now call them that way instead of armies, cause it’s more logical) was an awfull mess. It wasn’t well organized, buttons had misleading names and it was a pain to use it. But it’s rather hard to get a lot of information and/or functionality in one window (same was the case with the research window) so I totally revamped the window and it’s now much easier to use and information is presented in a way that you’ll directly find what you’re looking for. Besides that I also added some features, so you can now e.g. rename your divisions (looks better and makes them easier to find) and directly open up the region where that division is positioned.
And in addition to the above features a lot of my time went into working on the tools for Projekt “W”. I added a lot of stuff to WeltEdit (the main utility for getting content into the game), like a new tab where you can change stuff for each of the nations, finishing the research tab and also adding a localisation tab for later on getting the game into different languages. The GUI editor also has been updated a lot, mainly for usability but also adding some new features.
So the list of main features now is smaller by one entry again, and I’m slowly approaching a state of the project where I can at least call it feature-complete (not content-complete, that’ll take some more months I guess). So on to the next main feature!
Edit - Here are three brand new screenshots that I made for a posting of this project over at the PGD forums -
