Saturday, February 26, 2011

Progress Report (02/26/2011)

With this being final exam week at work, in addition to the perpetually problematic class I'm taking in grad school, there was very little time to work on the project this week.  What's more, the few tangible things that I did accomplish revealed a perplexing and disturbing bug in my LIME tool:  the floor detail layer, which has barely been tested until now, has some sort of random malfunction that cascades to the other layers.

On the brighter side, I finally finished my A* pathfinding implementation that I started all the way back in 2004, when I first designed and implemented the first version of the map data structure.  Well, it's not completely finished -- I still need to parameterize it with a way to specify the searchable directions.

Tomorrow I'm heading to GDC 2011, so I'm in for a busy week.  Still, I hope to spend a little time with this beloved project at some point.


Accomplishments:
  • Finally, after seven years, I have finished implementing the A* pathfinding algorithm for the tile maps in MHFramework.
  • Established a simple geometric pattern for giving an illusion of thickness to floors and platforms.  Tested it successfully, but then discovered the problem mentioned above with the floor details in LIME.
  • Wrote some more thorough algorithms for fixing a few of the ongoing annoyances, such as:
    • Optimizing the character data broadcasts.
    • Fixing the problem with chat messages getting lost between screen transitions.
    • Correcting the issue with the server randomly rejecting a connection after it has been accepted.
    • Correcting a tiling issue on the right-facing wall tiles generated by the MHFramework Wall Tile Transformer. (They're one pixel off from mirroring the left-facing walls and now I know why.)
  • Jotted down some notes and plans for moving forward as well.  For example:
    • The client and server responsibilities and requirements for handling the Move command have been established and pseudocoded.
    • Expanding the Wall Tile Transformer to output a greater variety of wall tile shapes, such as thin walls and walls that are perpendicular to the camera.
    • Expanding the Floor Tile Transformer to automatically generate "side" tiles compliant with the geometric patterns that I established this week.
    • Changing the background color on the LIME viewport to adapt to different tile sets.
Known Issues:
  • The floor detail layer is highly unstable and must be fixed very soon.
  • 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:
  • Fix the problems with the floor detail layer.
  • 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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