The screenshot you've all been waiting for...

Published on February 18, 2005 By CariElf In GalCiv Journals

Yes, you will get a screenshot of the Research screen today! Yay! But first, a few other things that I worked on:

1) A feature that I know that you'll all love, I made the trade offers right clickable. Right clicking on the items in the offer lists will bring up some kind of popup with info about the item. I forget who suggested this to me, so I can't give them credit, but they pointed out that when an alien makes an offer to you, you couldn't get any info on the techs that they were offering. And if you haven't memorized the tech tree, that can be a problem.

2) I started work on updating the save game code. So far, I've changed the location of where the save games are created to be in the My Documents\My Games folder. This will prevent the bug where if you're playing Gal Civ 2 on a non-administrator account, the game will crash when it tries to save. Also, if you have mulitple people playing Gal Civ and they each have their own windows account, they won't overwrite that AutoSave that you desperately need.

I'm also adding code in that will check to see if the definitions (for techs, ship designs, etc) saved in the game are the same as those that are loaded. This should cut down on loading time unless the versions are different. To cut down on saving time, I'll need to run a few profiles to see what's taking the longest and see what I can improve there.

3) The Minimap option buttons. Not all of them work yet, but they will. Joe is in charge of making the minimap actually draw since he remembers how to use math more than I do.

Edit: It occurs to me that you guys might like a screenshot of the minimap options too:

And, finally the research screen! Yay! The horizontal listboxes worked without a hitch. I had to implement a function that would manually scroll the listbox in the absence of a scrollbar because having a traditional scrollbar for the category list created issues. So now you can use the mousewheel over the category listbox, and it will scroll up and down, and there are two buttons for those of you who don't have a mousewheel. (I could not live without my mousewheel.) This screen is also the first screen to use tinting. All of the non-white areas on the screen are actually white (or grey) textures with a tint applied to them. The trickiest part of getting this screen to work was filling the listboxes. Each tech has a category and a subcategory. I had already generated a list of the categories. So I went through the list of techs and started adding them to the horizontal listboxes by their subcategories' index. So if it was the first subcategory in that category, it went in the first horizontal listbox, the second one below it, etc. Each entry in the horizontal listboxes was given a filter value that was their category's index. So, when you click on the category button, it fliters out all the other entries that don't match. It works beautifully.

And here's the screenshot. I hope that you like it!

I actually wrote this blog early today so that I would be ready to report my progress at the meeting today. So before I leave for the day, I'll see if I can finish the save games.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Comments (Page 2)

CariElf

on Feb 24, 2005

I'm using a windows API to get that folder path, so it should pick it up. You'll have to let me know if you have problems.

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