Our first goal in the development phase of Gal Civ 2 is to have Gal Civ 1's functionality working with the 3D engine. While Joe was working on upgrading the engine that we created for Political Machine, I began cleaning up our code library Pear and continued my work from Political Machine of converting it to use 3D code. It's now much lighter, more flexible, and generally just better written than the stuff that was written in 1995 (although, to be fair, Pear was great back in the day--we've...

I think that we've mentioned a couple of times that GC2 will support resolutions higher than 1024 x 768. Instead of just stretching everything like most games do, though, we actually are going to use the extra space. So by going to a higher resolution, you will actually get to view more of the star map than if you were running at the basic 1024x768. Also, if you run in windowed mode, you can set the size of the window to be any size as long as it's no larger than your desktop resolution an...

Well, I finally managed to get the tiling code done this week, so I should be able to hook up the pictographs on the planet management screen that show the production values (military, social and research) at some point when we get back from the holidays. I started working on the trade screen so that we could get some diplomacy back in the game. Apart from the popups associated with the trade screen, I have all the code moved over from the GC1 trade screen into the new one. It was mainly ...

The most noticeable thing that I did this week was the options window. Currently, it's just a listbox of checkboxes and their labels, just so that we can test with the various options on and off. I also added some of the ship movement/end turn options back in and tested those. The ship movement and end turn code seems to be working much better than it did in GC1; there were always a few oddities in that code before. I added in the options to turn on anti-aliasing, which really makes ...

We made a lot of tweaks this week, a lot of little changes that add up to be a lot of work. For our milestone that was last week, we had to have the most basic stuff of GC working: in other words, we had to be able to play a game of GC and win (or lose) by military means. A cultural victory might have been possible, too, but without starbases it's kind of impractical to test. We also don't have an interface for managing research yet because we need to mock up how the new streamlined tec...

We had a set list of things that needed to work in GC2 by the end of November, pretty much the very basic elements of Gal Civ that would let you play and win or lose by military means. We finished that, and so yesterday Brad gave us his feedback. One of the things that he brought up was that the end of the turn was taking too long. Now, we really haven't changed all that much of the end turn process, so I wasn't really sure what was causing the problem. I went into the code and put in...

I worked on the save game wnd this week, modifying the graphics from the options wnd. It needs some tweaking, graphically, but I think that all the code it needs is in, and I was able to test to make sure that I could load a saved game. I'm not sure how well it will work if you do it from within a game, or for that matter, how starting a new game from within a game works. I did some minimal testing on this mostly to make sure that it wouldn't crash, but the weirdness that resulted may hav...

It took me longer than I would have liked to work on the save game code this week, and I don't even have it hooked up to the interface yet. However, I was finally able to save a game and load the data back in without crashing. The save game code itself is mostly the same as it was in GC1/AP, but I had to go through and update the places where new data types were added and old ones needed to be changed. However, now it is smart enough to check and see if the data saved is the same version a...

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 of...

The most visible thing that I worked on this week was the Trade Screen. It's going to be pretty much the same functionality as in GC1 and currently it's only using filler gfx, so I'm not going to post a screenshot for it yet. Apart from needing the new graphics, it's pretty much ready to go. However, you will be happy to know that the popup dialog for money and influence will have fast buttons like the troop loading screen. I'm thinking that these fast buttons may need to have scaleable...

A lot of the work that we've been doing so far has been work that previewers need to see. Now we have to get a lot of stuff in that has to be in for the beta. Up until now, the economy has been the same GC1 economy. Next week, we'll be starting to implement the new economy based on the new planet system. So I got the domestic economy screen working. There's a bug somewhere in the screen file so it isn't displaying correctly and it's the dirty graphics anyway so no screenshot of it this w...

Edit: this was last week's journal but it ended up under the wrong topic somehow.Well, last we were all hysterically busy getting ready for Brad's media tour, which went very well. This week we were breathing a little easier, but we were still doing some clean up because it became apparent last week that we were being a bit sloppy with handling our resources. The most noticeable thing that I did this week was to get the new Options screen working the way it's supposed to work so that J...

The primary thing that I worked on this week was decreasing the loading time when starting a new game. I had discovered last week that the graphics were what was taking up the most time to load. So the first thing I did was to create a background thread to pre-load the models so that they would be cached in system memory when the actual objects were being created. That helped a little, but not enough to make a noticeable difference. Since it was the anomalies that were taking the most tim...

Our current focus is to get the early part of Gal Civ looking and behaving the way it should, as much as possible. This includes the intro, more finalized versions of the setup screens, the ship design screen, the planet management screen, and more of the graphics in: more ships, anomalies, resources, and a variety of planet textures. We also have to make sure that you can play as any race. We also need to figure out how to minimize the time it takes to create a new game. It didn't ta...

I've been working on stuff for 1.2 this week as well as bug fixing and helping out with support. First, let's start out with the shiny new mods browse dialog! I don't get to post screenshots very often. By default, the mods folder is in My Documents\My Games\GalCiv2\Mods. This folder and all its subfolders are created when GalCiv2 runs for the first time. Several versions ago, I added an option to the prefs.ini file so that modders could change the location of this folder, but we didn't...