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 ...

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...

Our top priority since 1.1 came out has been resolving the memory and performance issues that people have been having. BoundsChecker didn't come up with any significant memory leaks, so that left us with checking the change logs to see what we might have done to cause the issues. We were obviously doing something wacky, because people with 4 GB page files were still getting out of virtual memory errors. One of the changes we made was to the way that the shipcfg files were parsed. The ...

Hey all, I know it's been awhile since I've done a dev journal, so I thought that I'd take the time to do one while I'm compiling. Some of the bigger changes that I made for Beta 4 were to improve performance. I spent some time with BoundsChecker tracking down memory leaks. The nice thing about fixing memory leaks is that often fixing one will fix others, and fixing memory leaks fixes problems that they cause. For example, a lot of the memory leaks were in the graphics code. When you le...

We've been pretty busy here getting ready for Beta 3. The game has come a long way since Beta 2, and we still have miles (or should I say, milestones) yet to go. For the last two weeks, my primary responsibility has been fixing and tweaking stuff. One of the bigger issues that we've been dealing with almost since we started working on GC2 has been the load time. The way that the interface and other graphics are created in GC2 is radically different than it was in GC1. In GC1, a scre...

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 featur...

The crashes and memory errors made it impossible for me to test to see if the AI was building starbases, so my main priority this week was debugging the crashes and memory errors. I did some multi-tasking and worked on the fleets in a clean copy of the project while running the game in the AI test mode and waiting for it to crash, but more on that later. At first, I tried using BoundsChecker, which works well for memory and resource leaks, but doesn't really help much for heap errors, w...