Doolwind

Just a quick note to say I’ve finished the initial implementation of my ‘Help Bubble System’. Each User Interface item (button, image etc) can have two pieces of help information added to them. When you mouse over the item for a few seconds a small help bubble is displayed, and if you keep mousing over for a little longer a second, more detailed, bubble is displayed. I also quickly rewrote my user interface parser so it now reads in all of the key-values pairs for a user interface control and can parse them in any order. This allows me to add fields that are not required, such as help info. Below is a screenshot showing an example with both levels of help bubble displayed.

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I’m back home again and enjoying my second week of holidays. Unfortunately it’s so incredibly hot and humid that it’s making life difficult to work in front of the computer. I decided to spend a few hours working out my schedule of what I need to do before I’m ‘feature complete’ for the tech demo. I’ve got a list of 20 things I need to complete, totally approximately 126 hours. This time is overcompensating and hopefully it should be done with a lot less time than that. However, assuming that about right, I should be able to complete it within about 12 weeks. That puts my deadline at about the 7^th of April. I’m going to set that for now and see how I go over the coming weeks before I make it a definite date.

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Again a lot has happened since my last post and I’ll try and remember everything I’ve been doing since I last reported in. Firstly, with Cliff’s help I tested CIC over the internet and it worked without a hitch. All the messages were passed around correctly and considering I haven’t put any timing code in there was very little lag. I took a quick screenshot of the game we played against each other below:

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I’ve made quite a bit of progress over the past week and have completed the core implementation of both the offensive and defensive states. Along with the ability to choose the path and type of missiles to fire the player can now select incoming groups of missiles and choose which counter missiles to fire at them. I’ve also put some extremely simple AI in so the enemy ship fires missiles as well. Over the next week I’m going to be getting the spider webs out of the network system and making sure everything runs smoothly. From there I’m going to put together the first closed alpha test of the game. It will allow two players to shoot it out against each other both firing missiles and shooting down their opponents missiles. I’m hoping for some feedback on which areas of the game need tweaking, and a general idea of how much fun CIC is.

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I’ve finally finished the first pass over my missile interception code. It took me quite a while to iron out the remaining bugs, but it’s all done now. I ended up having 3 bugs which were causing the missile to miss slightly, however now they’re fixed it’s looking quite good.

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