Well, I didn't get as much done this week as I had hoped to, but what I did get done was important. I started out by filling out as many as the blank functions that allow the code to bring up dialog boxes, etc, as I could. Everything that has a screen (or that can temporarly hijack another screen) is now hooked up to the interface, so a lot more of the little things like "Are You Sure" prompts and things like that are hooked up. The ones that are still blank are to access screens that have...
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...
Brad recently received an e-mail from a user who had read the postmortem for The Poltiical Machine on Gamasutra Link Hi Brad, I just read your article in Gamasutra and found it pretty interesting. Sounds like the Political Machine was a fun project to work on. In discussing it, you mentioned that the reason for using DirectX 9 was the TrueType font support, and something I was wondering about was whether you looked at using the FreeType font rendering engine or not. I do some graphic...
My friends D'Arcy and Jeff and I went to Spicer Apple Orchards this Sunday to pick apples. Jeff's parents, sister and uncle also came with us, and his sister's family. It was the first time that I'd ever gone, but Jeff and his family have been going for years. It's really gorgeous with all the leaves changing color, and the apples themselves are very colorful. The weather was just perfect, sunny and in the sixties. It didn't take us that long to fill up our grocery bags full of apples...
So, I get this IM from one of Stardock's customers on MSN, or more accurately, his fiancee. The fiancee told me to never IM the guy again, or I'd be sorry, calling me two very not nice names, neither of which are accurate. So I told her that it wasn't like that, that he only asks me for help with programming questions occasionally, and I used one of the same terms that she used for me. The conversation went downhill from there, involving swearing on her part. I ended up telling her that e...
Today's title comes from the song "Friends and Lovers." This is the sequel to my previous entry, Link I can probably tell the rest of the story now. I don't think that any of my friends read my blog, so I don't think that anyone will see this before they find out about the subject. And if they do, well they will probably find out sooner or later anyway. I met my friend Ryan through mutual friends who went to U of M with him. He is the first addition to our litle group that star...
I am getting sick of being the "safe" female. I am a nice, non-threatening, geeky girl who will never ask a guy trick questions like "Does this make me look fat?". I don't play mind games. I would be just as happy to stay home and play video games with a guy as go out to dinner and a movie. I am as capable of making dirty jokes as I am of not being offended by them. So guys get along great with me. But there have been few guys who actually wanted to date me rather than just being a good ...
I had an interesting dream last night. It was one of those dreams where it was so realistic that the little part of my brain that normally tells me that I'm asleep and dreaming wasn't speaking up. I was at my grandmother's house, and new people were moving in across the street from her. (My grandmother lives in a subdivision where all the houses were built in the 50s and 60s, and a good portion of them started out as ranch houses, but a lot of them have had second stories added.) The new ...
We're close to wrapping up Altarian Prophecy, and 1.2 is pretty much ready to go. We still need Logistics techs, and someone reported that the minors are still building trade goods. There have been some reports about the time to complete technology being inaccurate (which would be in the base Gal Civ as well), but I now can't find the threads where people talked about this in enough detail for me to do something about it. That means I'm going to have to create a post, and so I'm probabl...
I keep a notebook by my computers so that I can make quick reminder notes of things I need to work on, or look into, etc. Unfortunately, my handwriting sucks, and I fill up a page quickly. So I made myself an excel spreadsheet similar to my bug report tracking spreadsheets, and that's been working a bit better. Rather than checking stuff off, I move it to another sheet in the workbook. The workbook has 4 sheets in it: a to do list, a needs testing list, a done list, and a shelved list. The t...
This week has been rather busy. We posted another beta last week, so we had the usual upsurge of activity on the forums. We've had very few new bug reports, and people are very pleased by the beta. One thing that is confusing them is that most of them have turned off their prompts so that they don't realize that they are spending money when they automatically build a starbase. A few people have been having problems with saving scenarios they make with the scenario editor. One of them ...
I always seem to end up a day behind in my blogs, so hopefully I can catch up today. This is what I had planned for yesterday: *Check to see what happens when you try to increase the difficulty from the race setup screen and not all the alien races are enabled. *Show saved games from the campaign on the Select Campaign window. *Make sure that the default text works for missions winning + losing without victory/defeat text. Well, I did check to see what would happen when trying to incr...
Yesterday and today I spent working on the campaigns. I had most of the code in place, but it was jury-rigged with #ifdefs in the old screens, for testing purposes. So I had to move that code into the new screens where they belonged, taking it out of the old screens, and make sure that the code worked. I also made a test campaign, which had the additional bonus of testing the editors. So now on the new opening menu, you click on Start Campaign, and it brings up the Select Campaign window. ...
Well, we're just about ready to post another beta for Altarian Prophecy. Some new features in this build will be 2 new AI players, 4 new ships, and logistics. I think that I've gotten all of the bugs out of the new save game format. The crash has been fixed for awhile, but there were a lot of little things that weren't re-initializing correctly when the game was loaded. We'll also be including docs for the editors with this next update. And the infamous invisible ship bug has been squished!...
The results for the PC games of 2003 are in at Gamespy.com! Galactic Civilizations came in #1 for Turn Based Strategy, with Rise of Nations being #1 for Real Time Strategy. I'm so excited that I can hardly form coherent sentences! So I'll post a few quotes from the article. "...GalCiv rescued turn-based strategy gamers from a pretty mediocre year with one of the best "4X" games on the market....The game's great blend of military strategy and diplomatic maneuvering make it a must-have...