Please note that this developer has had too much sugar today
When last we met our intrepid explorer, er, developer, she was tracking down crashes and memory that was modified after it was deleted. Having slain all the bugs in her path, our heroine has since moved on to more exciting work, development of the fabled Fleet Combat Window.
It began as many adventures begin; that is to say, it was pretty mundane. (You can’t really make setting up string fields and the like sound exciting.) The excitement begins when heroine began working on main feature of the screen, the brand new (and shiny) Scene View Window. The Scene View Window is the child of the Model View Window, which you will be familiar with from the Ship Design Screen and numerous other locations in our esteemed beta. The Model View Window, however, is meant to display only one model. The Scene View Window will allow any number of models, and will show scripted scenes. For the Fleet Combat Window, this means that we will actually be able to watch the fleets battling it out! Jesse Brindle, the newest addition to the Gal Civ team, will work on the code to setup the battle script. We do not yet know if we will see this Scene View Window used in other places, or if the modding community will be able to make use of it.
Having finished her part (at least for now) on the Fleet Combat Window, our industrious developer went on to get the new Research Complete Screen up and running. Though missing necessary graphics, the screen is currently functional. As this screen will be familiar to anyone who has played Galactic Civilizations, there is little of interest to note. However, before starting work on this screen, our heroine made an important discovery: it is possible to add your own custom files to the new item menus in Visual Studio. Net 2003. Since all of GalCiv2’s screens start from a template file, our heroine added the files to appropriate folders, modified the relevant vsdir files, and voila! The templates for creating screens are now part of the new item menus. This will save her the trouble of always needing to copy and rename the files from the source directory.
This concludes our adventure for this week. Tune in next week when our heroine tries to get starbases to animate! Until then, my friends, adieu.
Disclaimer: No, I've not flipped or gotten a big head. I just decided to write my dev journal like this on a whim, no doubt inspired by the amount of sugar and caffeine I've had today. Or maybe just because it's Friday.