It’s weekend and my last posting was almost a month ago, but don’t worry, I’m not idle at all. As for “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”, I finally got around writing the manual to it, and while doing so I noticed that it’s actually pretty hard to write a manual for such a complex game. And even worse if it’s your own game, as it’s extremly hard to write a manual that can be used to learn the game by someone that has never played it. So this is a pretty tiresome process that takes a lot of time and patience. But I won’t get around this and I think it doesn’t make any sense to release a beta to the public without a manual on how to play it. Though this time it won’t be a single PDF as it was for “Phase 1”, but instead it’ll be an HTML manual that I’ll also upload to this page so people can take a look at it online, since it’ll also include the technology tree, unit types, building types etc.
In addition to that I also finally found a good foundation fo the whole datanet espionage (and sabotage) part of the game. I’v been dodging this for months (or even years), as it’s almost a completely new game inside Projekt “W” with a lot of stuff to implement. The first parts of this are already in the game and it’s looks like this could become a valuable addition to the game’s other new features that people will use often. You’ll be able to get a lot of data from your enemy nations, but not without a risk and you can even sabotage stuff like their research or global projects.
And as you may have heard, Embarcadero have released a new Version of Delphi, XE3. And once again they decided not to include our up-to-date OpenGL headers and instead went again with their old outdated one. So if you want to see our headers included in Delphi and own an EDN account, you may want to vote on this report. As for XE3, it’s pretty much what I expected (tested the trial in a virtual machine). If you do OpenGL-related stuff or are into game development, you can easily skip and stick with your old version or move (if you haven’t) to Free Pascal and Lazarus, which would be my choise anyway if I’d were to start a new game. And yes, I’ve been thinking about porting Projekt “W” to Free Pascal so I could port it to at least Linux (and maybe MacOS), but that’ll be a lot of work, so that’ll have to wait until after the beta.