Progress Report (02/19/2011)

I guess I owe my progress this week to Professor Burke of DePaul University.  I would have had no time to work on this project were it not for one thing:  his class irritated me to such an extreme, intolerable degree that I felt the need to just get away from it and work on something more rewarding for a little while.  Team Laser Combat gives me experience that is just as useful, and it actually leaves me with something to show for the effort that I put into it.  The same cannot be said for Professor Burke's class.  It truly, deeply saddens me to say this, because I've spent the last two years praising DePaul and the wonderful experiences I've had there, learning amazing and useful things and immediately applying them in my daily life.  I only hope that when this class is over, those feelings will recover...even if my 3.96 GPA never does.  It's beyond depressing.

So let's talk about something happier.  The major step forward this week was the creation of the actions menu -- the central hub from which all player commands originate.

Oops!  That was supposed to be a hexagon!

That's more like it!  The Next Character and Previous Character buttons already work, and the others are hopefully not far behind.

Accomplishments:

• The actions menu is working.  Well, the buttons don't all function yet, but they soon will, one by one.  
• There's a button labeled "TEST" on the HUD.  It simulates what will happen when you receive the notification that it's your turn.  The actions menu pops up, centers on one of your characters, and tells you how many action points are left for that character.  There are buttons for the four actions -- attack, move, heal, and draw token -- as well as buttons for cycling through all of your characters, making it easy to find them and issue commands to them.
• Added more random tips to the game loading screen.  The new tips explain the UI customization features that I added to the design last week.
• On the advice of some professional graphic designers, I reduced the number of fonts in the game to three.  
• Aside from temporary placeholders, the only fonts you'll see now are Tahoma for text and GUI components, Android Nation for titles and headers, and OCR for editable or selectable data values.  Some work still remains to be done in this effort.
• The server now determines a random play order for the teams.  It lists all the team IDs and shuffles them to produce a random ordering between matches.
• Finally fixed the Join LAN mode!  It works better than ever!
• The server now lists all of the map files automatically and selects one at random.  Now we can add maps without changing any code.
• To test it, I added a map that I call "Nowhere to Hide" (file name "Nowhere.lime").  It's just one big room with no obstacles.

Known Issues:

• 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:

• Investigate ways to dynamically color the team uniforms.  Experiment on the placeholders.
• If this works, add the ability to dynamically color MHFont objects too.
• Broadcast and handle the "whose turn" message..
• Create the "whose turn" display to show it.
• Implement the Move action.  This will involve:
1. Decoupling the characters from the map structure.
2. Implementing network messages for the Move command.
3. Implementing the UI for selecting a destination.
4. Implementing a pathfinding algorithm.
5. Implementing path following behavior.

Medium Priority:

• Create the in-game chat component.
• But first, fix the issue with the lost messages by making the data structure static.
• 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.
• Implement the Draw Token action.
• Implement the Heal action.
• Implement the Attack action.
• Finish the team creation screen.
• Put in the floor image for the captains to stand on.
• Replace plain gray buttons with captain character images.
• Finish the level design guide.
• Design the 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.
• Replace the temporary column header graphic on the character equip screen.

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