We've got a new coder starting on Monday and in order to help him out, my co-workers and I have been compiling a list of guidelines about our coding practices.  Up until now, I've just sat down with new coders and given them a tour of our codebase and tried to convey our coding practices at that point, but new people always have a lot to remember and having a document to refer to might help.  I thought that I'd share our list with you and see if you have any suggestions to add. ...

We actually made a fairly major change to the code this week so I thought that I'd actually write a dev journal about it: CodeCritter and I gutted the movement code and re-implemented it.  For the developers out there, that meant creating a branch which generally makes me a bit nervous because I always worry that merging the branch back into the trunk is going to go poorly. But making a branch was essential in case it took us longer than a week to get the code to the po...

One of my tasks for this beta was getting in basic diplomacy, although it's still pretty primitive because the relations code is still pretty basic. You can bring up the Diplomacy screen by going to KingdomWnd and clicking on Foreign Relations.  If you've encountered another player, you can click on their entry and click the speak to button or double click on the entry.  This gives you 3 options, one of which is disabled: Info, Trade (disabled) and Negotiations.  Info compar...

The Zone of control (ZOC) code has always been a bit odd since it was written for GalCiv2, with weird little bubbles, twists, etc. But it mostly worked in GC2, and I didn't have time to give it a lot of love when porting it to the new engine. The code to update the ZOC is also fairly inefficient, which is why it only updates at the end of a turn. The ZOC expands based on the influence of the city and the player's influence ability.  It works by specifying a source, which has a power and a ...

It's been awhile since I've written a dev journal and we've got some new faces around here, so I'll take the opportunity to introduce myself. I'm Cari Begle, and I'm Stardock's Senior Game Designer and the programming lead on Elemental.  I've been working here at Stardock for 10 years.   Today I'm going to talk about Multiplayer.  I'll start with a quick rundown of the features for the people who haven't tried the beta,  and then get into some techie talk for those of you ...

Maybe it won't be as amusing to you guys as it was to me, but it made me laugh.   [1:35:38 PM] CrazyC0330 : i love how when you use the cheat to kill a unit, they do their death animation instead of just disappearing from the map. makes it so much more satisfying [1:35:51 PM] cari_elf: bloodthirsty much? [1:36:04 PM] CrazyC0330 : i usually do it right after they say something about my city being ripe for the taking [1:36:23 PM] CrazyC0330 : mess with fire, ya get burnt. ya ...