Don't know how to say it and not feel stupid, but, somehow, I really admire this devlog, and the way you develop M.I.N.T.

(follow)

Haha, well cheers I'll be keeping at it, and hopefully as some other projects drop off things will only increase.

So still plugging along on the map editor. Got a basic tree view style control working. Hope to have something more to show this weekend.

Do turns queue up to be spent like many php games such as Earth 2025, and kin have done?

Not really the same way. You can queue up actions to happen, but turns do not store up to be spent. For instance, you could queue up troop movement to explore an area or queue up some buildings to be constructed when the resources become available. The only action you probably wouldn't be able to queue up is placement of tiles since you won't know what tiles you will have during the next few turns (although it wouldn't be impossible).

Will be interesting to hear how combat works out in that type of model. Seems like you could be at some serious disadvantages if you don't have access to take turns and update orders every hour or two. (Not that you aren't at one with turns that queue up either, though its a bit different.)

Sounds pretty cool.

Do turns queue up to be spent like many php games such as Earth 2025, and kin have done?

So a scaled down look at the current map editor progress. On the left side I'm currently envisioning a collapsing/expanding tree list broken down by category such as terrain, buildings, units and so forth as well as a mini map at the top of it. This tree would be populated depending upon the environment chosen for the map.

We will no doubt end up with more menu bar items, and possibly a tool bar under that, but I'm trying to keep things super simple, yet very powerful at the same time.

So wrapped up the Tiled based adaption for use as M.I.N.T's internal building assembly tool. Things went pretty smoothly despite needing to learn QT data types, streams, and deal with unicode. Little bit of time in the hex editor never hurt anyone though.

Now to see if I can coax a tree list control out of MyGUI to drop into the real map editor.

So a nice unexpected surprise. The internal tool I was expecting to need to build, in order to assemble tiles into pre-fabricated buildings, which the map editor would then allow to be placed, has been scrubbed.

I'm going to be able to use the Tiled map editor for this building assembly functionality. I've already written a export plugin as well for it, though need to finalize the file format.

Hack and Slash, but where is Megabyte?

Well started in on the basics of the level editor, and MyGUI is holding up so far. (Thankfully, after the experiences with the others.)

This sadly won't be a quick process, but hopefully I can get the basics of what we need hammered out in the next week or two. Then I'll likely be enhancing, and polishing the editor for the next year or two.

What platforms/devices will this game be targeting to BTW?

Windows, Mac, and possibly Linux.

Well a good share of hours sunk into MyGUI now.  Neither the OpenGL renderer, nor the resource loading/data path stuff would work properly, and both had to have a lot of debug and re-writes.  Combine this with the source code comments, and documentation being in russian and it was a fun time for all involved.

However, the smoke has parted and things look to be working nicely. It also has an actual designer app, which looks quite promising, which is a big bonus.

Anyways now to see if I can get a level editor working with it.

And a few more

   

So I started to take a stab at MyGUI which so far i'm liking despite all the comments and documentation being in russian, and it having taken like 6 hours to get something rendering. Well see how far this relationship lasts.

Kawe has also been busy

Evolution, options, and some color schemes.

Units in M.I.N.T will have quite a bit of customization options, along with various point costs to balance these.

Not really a screenshot, but hey..

Evolution, options, and some color schemes.

For the record, I do think stress is a two edged blade, it can be harmful, but its also a very powerful motivator.

It depends on your circumstances obviously. Back in 2007-2011 when I was working as a software developer and architect, making tons of money, had tons of benefits, etc, the only real stress was self created stress to finish games, and be able to go independent full time. (Other than stress of the actual job, thats a whole other story.)

Than April of 2011 I decided I was going fulltime indie regardless of the risks, and stresses, I quit my job.  I had zero income, other than from games, while also having dependents, a 300k mortgage, credit cards, and other junk. Stress? Oh you can believe it.

Fast forward through 2 years of that, completing with multiple game releases, foreclosure and law suits, and I'm back in a more comfortable situation. I work from home, do around 20ish hours of game contract work a week which pays pretty much all of my current expenses, and the rest of the time is open to doing my own development.

This made a lot of sense, as I wanted to do a bigger game (M.I.N.T), and before I needed to make small games that could be finished quickly to keep generating income. Now I don't have to worry about that part, nor what happens when one of those games sells poorly. Much less stress currently, yet not fully independent anymore. 

So progress is a bit frozen at the moment. Have reached the point where I really need to start in on a map editor, in order to be able to nicely layout maps to test buildings, depth sorting, and so forth.

Unfortunately, I want the map editor to be cross platform. This means I've spent hours again examining GUI libraries. I'm now looking into MyGUI, which from an hour or two of looking at it, seems to have good potential. Though most of the documentation is in russian... except the bits on OGRE3D's wiki.

I may end up just rolling my own UI widgets at this rate. Something like wxWidgets or QT is also circling back around as a possible fallback, I just really prefer an OpenGL based solution, as I need GUI elements in-game as well.

sadly the gwen gui library is really turning out to be less than ideal.

Sorry to hear that, I feel bad for recommending it now 

It's just full of bugs?

Yeah that seems to be the case.

I mean I haven't explored it to far, but just every basic thing I try to do, I end up running into bugs.

1. Just building the included OpenGL renderer was impossible, as it ended up relying on ancient libraries like free image, which won't build correctly on recent versions of Mac. So I had to gut a bunch of the code in it, to just get a basic OpenGL (no skin/texture) support renderer working to see how the library would work, before writing my own renderer.

2. Buttons, and everything that is derived from a button/uses a button (like checkboxes, and windows with close buttons, scrollbars, etc) don't really handle mouse input properly. You can click down onto the button, hold the mouse button down, slide completely off the button, release the mouse button, and it still acts as if you clicked it.

So like say you start to click a window close button, but then change your mind and mouse away from it after having clicked it, but before releasing the mouse? Button is still clicked.

Even more oddly, after doing this, you can continue to click the mouse button up and down and it will keep triggering clicks on the button, despite being no where near it. You have to essentially move the mouse, with the mouse button released, for the button to stop thinking its being hovered over.

3. Scrollbars don't have any events for when you click the little arrow buttons at the end, nor can you hold down an arrow and have the bar continue to scroll.

Which when simple things like this don't work properly, I really start to get concerned when I think about much more advanced controls like tree controls, multi-line text boxes, and other junk.

It wouldn't be so bad if I popped over to the github, filled out an issue, and then got a response, maybe even a fix, however its been a week and I've received zero in the way of responses. It seems like the library isn't really maintained or worked on very consistently.

Which in the end is indeed a shame, since I really am liking how simple and lightweight it is. I just don't think I want to start trying to re-write bunches of it, to fix problems.

Beautiful graphics. Great choice of colors. I'm just stunned at how beautiful it looks.

Cheers

I like the concept as well. I'm betting the AI will prove quite challenging to implement.

Yeah AI will certainly be interesting to do. I'm not sure if we will have AI players for MP games or not, so some of the AI work maybe made easier if its just for the single player campaign. I have a hard time thinking about writing an AI that would work properly in MP with the number of options that will likely exist on a per map or even per game basis. (Points for the match, possibly limited units available, time limit per turn, than customization of said units, etc.)

I like doing AI work though, so we will see how it goes, once we get to that point. I remember one of the first AIs I actually did was just a set of rules and conditionals on paper for playing a specific Magic the Gathering deck some 19 years ago. We use to write logic for decks out, and then play them against each other. Good times.

[Z-sort = Y]

Looks gorgeous, especially the dinosaur unit on the first post :-)

Cheers

I tackled that one a while back on a similar looking system, pretty straightforward with your perspective:

Z-sort = Y

That is, the lower the tile on the grid, the higher the z-index. You might need to make adjustments if you have ground of different height etc, and naturally you'd need 2 layers: ground and sprites (inc. buildings etc)

Yeah it shouldn't be to bad, since I'm going through the pain of splitting all the buildings and such into single tile size pieces. Yet these things still tend to get messy when you throw in partial translucency, and various overlays. Hopefully we will see how it turns out real soon though