Progress Report (01/15/2011)

As much as it sickens and frustrates me to post this, I must admit that this week has brought no progress whatsoever.  Work, school, personal issues, and various things kept me from the project.  This does not mean that the project has been abandoned, however.  I'm eager to get back to it and experiment with improvements to the server architecture.  It just might be awhile, since my current work and school schedules are beyond heavy at the moment.

There was a bit of good news this week, however:  My wife and I are pregnant with our first child!  Yes, we have a little geekling on the way!

So...fear not, my friends.  I will be back!

Accomplishments:
None.  Nothing whatsoever.  (Do you know how painful it was to write that?)

Known Issues:

• The game setup process takes much too long to create and initialize the AI players.  Gotta optimize that and try to speed it up.
• As complexity grows, server crashes are becoming more frequent, and they leave no report or indication that something went wrong except that server responses stop coming back to the client.  I really need to make the server a lot more robust and verbose.
• Network latency causes character upgrades to not show up right away.  The client needs to wait for the updated character to return from the server before returning to the team screen.
• The color cycle control on the team creation screen throws an exception when there is only one color remaining to choose from.  This is only an issue when setting up a game with eight human players.
• Chat messages get lost when a user in multiplayer mode switches between the lobby and the team/character configuration screens.
• When a player drops off, their team data is orphaned.  The server needs to recognize this and place the orphaned team under AI control.

Next Steps:

High Priority:

• Beef up the server...again.
• Create the action button menu.
• Investigate ways to dynamically color the team uniforms.  Experiment on the placeholders.
• Create the "whose turn" display.
• Create the character data viewer.

Medium Priority:

• Fix the team color selection for the eighth human player.
• Create the HUD's event log display.
• Finish voice scripts for narration.
• Finish asset lists for current set of level designs.
• Formalize the flowchart for the AI logic.

Low Priority:

• Create the token factory and displays.
• Finish the team creation screen.
• Put in the floor image for the captains to stand on.
• Replace plain gray buttons with captain character images.
• Create command line interface for server so it can be launched and configured remotely.
• Finish the level design guide.
• Design the TLC web site.
• Get coin display graphics from the art team.
• Add it to the team configuration screen.the character configuration screen and the recruitment screen.

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