Changelog - picture heavy

[Cyrano]

GIVEITGIVEIT #GIVEIT

That is all...

[Adraeth]

It feels like an excellent engine ... i am here wonder how many battles i will edit with this new UMS .... work hard and bring it to us 

thanks for every update

[Andy ONeill]

Hi guys,

Good to see people are keen.
I hope that lasts 

I'm still a while off completing the map editor.
This version will have some ( I guess quite big ) files associated with a map that you use just to edit them.
As you draw there are many points define the line you draw. These will be saved to files and of course "many" anything means big.
I plan on zipping these though.

The prototype you may have tried only has the areas you drew until you click that commit button. They're then copied onto a picture and gone.
You make a mistake then you have to live with it or start again.
This is the nature of prototypes.

The new version will retain all the data so you can edit later and retain the quality.
It is planned to allow you to export vector pictures ( probably pdf ) so you can print a high quality map to poster size.
When playing the game, these terrain objects probably won't be used and you'll instead effectively use a picture of the map as a background.
I might think about giving the option to retain those objects instead but the large size would mean we couldn't support transfer from a pbem / live server as is planned. There's also a fair bit of overhead in stuff like arranging all the trees in a forest.

Then there's the actual game to write.
The pace probably looks pretty glacial from an observers point of view but it's pretty quick for development generally.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the apps will also be improved after release.
As we see issues, receive do-able suggestions or I think of stuff then they will be added.
This is a suite which is intended to have a long life time.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Added City.

I spent a while thinking about how to draw a convincing looking city.
This works with a sort of vector scan of a real map.
The user will be able to pick from a number of such models but they don't really scale so well.  I have three. I did what I felt was the least convincing first as a proof of concept.



The image I see in preview is about 1.3 x the original. It'd also probably look better if I was more careful about drawing the shape.
If it looks a bit abstract, that's intentional.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Here's another option.



I'll do a couple more pre-built ones.
Clearly, it's impossible to offer something for every single sort of city people might want and we want flexibility to encourage people to get creative.

I'm going to allow the user to add specific buildings.
You can't really beat the human brain for working out sensible layouts.
This will offer the flexibility required to place a house next to a road or river and another next to it.
Villages will work better that way and if you have the time and energy for a complete city then you can go wild.
Those that don't care and are happy with an abstract rectangle kinda looks like buildings.... well they're already covered.

There will be another option to import a picture. You would draw an area on the map set it to your picture and allocate a terrain type  to that. City will be one option. This will be necessarilly rather fiddly but is the only realistic way to cover some possibilties. Bear in mind the entire map can also be a picture if you want buildings scattered all over a massive city.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

First cut of contours ( for hills ).


Not terribly exciting I'm afraid.
I still need some way for the user to say what elevation each contour is to be and decide how to  display that for review. Probably when selected.

When I did this I drew several contours inside one another and found a bug.
Pretty nasty one actually.
The animation which does the marching ants wasn't always stopping and that's very bad because it's a resource hog.
Fixed that.

[Andy ONeill]

Model

Added Square to formations.
After some discussion we came to the conclusion that Infantry will be able to form square but light infantry will not.

Map Editor

Added setting height to contours.
This is in "units". There's a factor which converts these to metres.
Elevation units vary from 0 to 255.
The reason for this is due to how elevations are held and the way we intend most maps to be built.
Contours are intended as a fallback because drawing a map using these can be pretty tedious and there is no gradation between layers.
The preferred approach is to use a picture with white throug shades of grey to black.
255 shades of grey.
We're the team that just keeps on giving.
More than 5 times the grey of those colourful books 

In case you missed earlier posts.
The contour with the black dashes corresponds to the one selected in the left and it has a "marching ants" animation makes those dashes move round. You will not miss which piece of terrain you selected.



I might hide the id over on the right since it has no particular meaning to the user. That's what internally identifies the piece of terrain but you will never have to actually know that. It should quickly be obvious to any user that the most recent terrain they drew appears at the top of that list and the first at the bottom. It will scroll if you draw a lot.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Added roads.
I'm undecided about the colour of the outline and fill.
Because black looked a bit harsh I've made it fairly fine ( 1px ) and dotted.

You will notice that a road always has a line all he way round it. That's because it's not clever, it doesn't know part of it is on top of another road.
I will probably give an option to combine all roads into just one shape for making the map "picture" at the end of the process to avoid that effect.
I'd have to try it and see but I can't think of any bad side effects from doing that.
Doesn't mean there aren't any.



I hope everyone is enjoying Easter.
 

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

First cut of Rivers.
When you draw them initially they're a line the same width like a road.
On the edit tab there's currently a prototype button with a > on it.
This applies ink "pressure" along the stroke you drew for the selected river.
It does so from the end you started drawing.
There'll be a < button to do from end to start. Although drawing a river that way just seems wrong to me.
I'll do some better symbols for the signs rather than lt and gt signs.
We also need a way to specify width since rivers will vary a fair bit.
If you use a stylus to draw a river then you can alter the pressure yourself manually.
For anyone unfamiliar with stylus - the higher the pressure the thicker the line you draw.



Similar to roads, you'd currently get a line round any bit of water. I'll allow the user to combine lakes and rivers into one compound object which will avoid that line across joins I talked about in the roads above.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Finished the buttons for setting widening on rivers programmatically.



The chevron pointing  to the right will make the narrowest part the end you started your ink stroke from.
The one on the right does so from the end ( which seems weird to me but maybe someone will want to draw that way ).
The rectangle makes the width equal all along.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Prototyping combined water.

Before



After




Note that the waves on the lake are in a layer below the combined result. They're still there, you just can't see them. I'll fix that once I've shaken the bugs out of this method.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Another iteration on combining water.
You can now combine and split water.
When you combine it hides the separate objects, when you split it will show them again.
Combined water appears in the "correct" layer so waves are on top of a lake once combined.
It's actually a separate object and the process of working out how the various shapes combine is pretty expensive but only takes a couple of seconds on my i5 machine in debug mode. It will be faster in the real thing - debug code is not optimised by the compiler and Visual Studio (the development environment) isn't exactly lightweight.

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

Added roads to combine / split logic.
They go on top of water.
Submerged roads aren't terribly practical.
I reckon some people will want to dash off a quick map as quick as possible and this allows you to not bother with bridges.

Fixed a bug which was eating processing.

[Adraeth]

Roads (instead of bridge) over troubled water  ... excellent idea; yes i am one of those to make a fast map to play almost immediately

[Andy ONeill]

Map Editor

I might have explained this earlier but maybe at the risk of repeating.
Which terrain is on "top" isn't just a visual thing.
There's a 2 dimensional array of terrain type used for spatial A* navigation and for tactical movement.
This will need to be calculated at the end of drawing a map.
Whichever piece of terrain is top wins and that's what the square terrain is.
There are 1155 x805 "squares". They're 1px x 1px  - and very small.
The grid you see on the screen shots is 35x35px.

A road over a river makes the cells it crosses road and a crossing point. Your courier might decide to swim across if the alternative is a very long distance and a river is narrow. Combat units will not.

Development work, largely internal:
Changed background colour of swamp to green (from light blue) so it is more clearly distinct from water.
I've refactored the "marching ants" animation process. This was to avoid repeated storyboards ( the thing that does the animation moves the dashes ). There's a very technical reason why this was worth doing that only wpf developers would be interested in.