Because of various things that I had to do in support of my lovely wife, I was stuck in a few situations this week where I was unable to work on my job or my homework. That means I actually had a little bit of time here and there to work on this project instead! My accomplishments for the week, in the order listed below, consist of one big accomplishment, one medium, and two small ones. So it hasn't been a week of hyper-productivity like I had last month, but it's far better than last week when I accomplished nothing whatsoever. We must be thankful for what we get...and only grumble softly under our breath.
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| Thank goodness it's all back! Don't worry, there won't be nearly so much garbage text on screen in the finished product. That's mostly for debugging purposes. |
- Fixed the largest of the various server issues! Crashes are now far rarer than they were before. The main issue ended up being a huge mistake I made when trying to improve feedback during AI creation. I had simply placed some things out of order.
- Further optimized the AI creation procedure. It still takes too long, but it has definitely taken a step in the right direction.
- Devised a plan for handling the lack of feedback during AI creation: Just put a message on the lobby screen telling the user what's going on! It's in there; just gotta tweak it a bit.
- Experimented with layouts for the octagonal spaceship landing platforms. I think the design will work very, very well...for aesthetics as well as game play.
- The game setup process takes much too long to create and initialize the AI players. Gotta optimize that and try to speed it up.
- 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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