What I did instead of write stories, play Exalted, and relaxed. In itself, I wouldn’t have been bothered by it, but that is the same thing I’ve been doing for two months on the project. I basically haven’t touched it since before GenCon.

Also, at GenCon, I got Mr. Helfers interested in my Mudd Fournier novel (working title is “Muddy Reflections”). I already have the major parts written, I just need to merge the two short stories and novella together, change how they all end, and basically package it. Doing that, I know I can do. Writing isn’t a struggle for more, not like writing games is.So, while I’m going to stop on Turf Wars, I am going to work on a project I know I can do and want to do. It is due at the end of the year (Helfers looks at novels only in January, as I mentioned in the WBM entries).

It will also give me a chance to play with Triumph for fightertype. I know she would like to see Itrifore’s world done up properly at some point, so I’ll aim for that also. Both of those are things I’m much more comfortable with and maybe I won’t find myself doing “everything but.”

But, Fluffy should be home tonight, which means I will, naturally, have this sudden burst of energy and start working my ass off… just because she’s home. Oh well, at least I got about half of the things I wanted to get done on my todo list; I just avoided all the “big” ones.

I also started the scenario editor. The first part of the scenario editor is placing of buildings, this is also used in the game. At the moment, I’m going to just create a “plate” at large as the building being placed and let the player see where it can or cannot be placed. That should give me a good basic start on this entire process.

Ideally, when you move the mouse around (while holding the spacebar at the moment), it will move the plate around and turn it blue when you find a valid spot. You can rotate with the right mouse button. However, there is a little bug with the Irrlicht.NET CP code (that will be fixed as soon as it gets into SVN, I think) that prevents me from finding where the mouse is over; that should be fixed “soon.’ and I’ll be able to move forward with this.

This took me quite a bit to figure out and I’m still not done. The rules for how steep aren’t in there (I’m going to stay steep if all four corners aren’t the same height) and I really want to get the building placement stuff done.

But… some screenshots:

The following screenshots are the retile process. Basically, I just take all the tiles and put them at the highest hight, then drag them down until they hit ground. It isn’t really fancy or anything, but at least approximates the ground layer. The most important parts are when there is one or more tiles at the same level, which there are regions that have that. Those are where the building placements are going to be in the scenario builder. The white tiles won’t be visible to the user in any other stage, this is just for setting region controls.

I also changed the file structure around so this would be appropriate for actually importing into the SVN for CeGui# and helping others.

Once I get all of this working perfectly, I’ll have the GUI done for Turf Wars with significantly need work than if I created/reinvented the wheel myself.

I played around with Irrlicht# which actually follows the CLS, but… isn’t quite there yet. Sadly, the engine won’t handle what I want it to without me spending a fair amount of time playing with the engine itself. Maybe if I finish the game early, I’ll port it from Irrlicht.NET (Windows-only) to Irrlicht# (hopefully Linux-friendly too).

However, in the process, I got this annoying LoaderLock issue when trying to run the Irrlicht# example. Someone pointed out a link:

• ZBuffer: Why do I get a ‘LoaderLock’ Error when debugging my Managed DirectX application

That resolved my problem, but I just don’t think it is there yet. So, Irrlicht.NET seems the best method to start with, assuming I can actually get it to build the work in memory. Failing that, I’m going to have to drop down to Tao.OpenGL and puzzle it out at that level (and create the loaders, and create the everything else). Or, I could actually try to get OgreDotNet working properly and see if that can resolve my problems instead.

On the other hand, I think I’m moving forward with trying to get something worthy of a screenshot in the game. Last night, I threw together a mesh which I could rotate around. I just want something more… related as a screenshot.

So, giving that view of things, I think I have an idea of how to change the game around so it can be “fun” or at least closer to games that I’ve enjoyed in the past. The micromanaging of the vassals needs to go, that was getting too difficult. The orders will probably stay, but change in their format.

I think I’m going to start with the building arrangement. In the current version, all buildings were 30 meters by 40 meters, but I think I want to have more irregular-shaped buildings, along with the ability to lay them out. Maybe have what you can build based on the businesses in the area (you need a road construction company to make changes to the roads, an aborist (can’t spell) to remove or plant or purchase plants, etc).

I also browsed through the various game engines, it appears to be either Ogre3D with OgreDotNet or Irrlicht.NET. I’m going to start with Irrlicht.NET and see if I can managed to get most of the game out.

• Parsing
• Pre-generate Tool
• Renderer
• Choosers (Gtk# and SWF)

For Turf Wars, all I have left is to get the tool done and find a good calendar that fits the world view (10 months, fits our 365.something days in the year). Then, I can get back to orders. Such a large task, making a calendar, for what basically is a cosmetic problem, but I’m planning on using it a LOT with some of the later games.