Friday, January 7, 2011

23 – Going pro

In an attempt o not bore myself or my very few readers, I will be periodically switching format over here.  I changed the layout and theme of the blog, but the bigger change is going to be in format. Up to this moment, my posts were free format free flowing block of text. Starting with this post, I’ll try to organize it into sections. This way it going to be easier to figure out what the post is about and will also serve as a quick change log.

New world creation dialog

When selecting a new game, users will be greeted by a dialog that will allow them to select a few details, like the general layout and content of their respective slice of the world, the size of the slice, biome, alignment and savagery of the region. Item properties of wet and dry are ignored for now.
This dialog is quite ugly, but this is intentional. A massive user interface overhaul is planned, and any effort to align stuff, decorate or make it beautiful would be a waste until then. So I am going to focus on quick, sparse and to the point dialogs.

This dialog is the first one in a series that will allow you to customize your world and expedition parameters. The next one is the “Expedition customizer” dialog.

Expedition customization dialog is back

In case you were wondering why you haven’t seen this dialog since my third post, this was one of the first pieces of code I have written and was well before the Irrlicht transition and ever since it has been dead code. But now it is back and converted to Irrlicht.
The conversion was quick and painless, with very few features lost, but now it is ugly and doesn’t really fit on the screen unless I increase the resolution. It will have to do for now. I’ll have to rethink the way skills work, an especially the large number of them. I’ll have to condense it as much as possible without losing depth.

Expedition supplies dialog is back

Yet another dialog back from the dead? Well, zombies are very popular nowadays.  The revival of this dialog was less straight forward and is more of a rewrite. Item availability is governed by a new property of items called avail. The editor has been updated to support this value.

DHEditor has new layout and properties

The tab based layout was not going to be long lived, since the editor will eventually have a large number of tabs. The new layout is based on menus. The editor also supports a few extra properties and has a new “tab”.

New butchery editor

As you have seen when in the section about expedition supplies, you can choose not meat before embarking. The results of butchering an animal are now entered in the editor, using a new tab. As you can see, I am very fond of the spreadsheet look. Did you know that dwarven engineers were the first sentient being to use spreadsheets?

Serialization validation

All operations of serialization to streams or XML are now governed by a validation process. Should it encounter an invalid value, it will correct it and log the occurrence. Theoretically it should be impossible to crash DwarvesH now with invalid data. But I am looking forward on you proving me wrong.


Statistics

DHCore                                1823 / 43.3 / 10
DH                                        3093 / 77.4 / 18
DHEditor                              780 / 20.3 / 15
Total lines                           5696 lines

No comments:

Post a Comment