Loading/Saving almost done

I finished the Saving part, and I'm currently working on loading files from disk.

I decided to go with an XML fileformat, as it's easiest to read and understand by humans. Since I don't store a lot of information, it's seemed logical I make it human readable. The format is really simple, but I'm not yet quite happy with it. It seems a bit, uhm, disorganized/illogical mapped out.

I'll work it out a bit better tomorrow, and see what it turns into. Also, I got the New Map dialog in(Altho without Author information and map name), display which tile the user has selected(That is, the x, y coordinates within the map, relative to 0, 0 of the map, not of the screen) and I display the map dimensions.

I did add the UI for the 3x3 brush, but I haven't written the code for it yet, but that's pretty simple.

So, I got everything down to:

• Auto saving
• Finish loading
• Save Dune 2: The maker files
• The code of the 3x3 brush

That's pretty minimal work to do. Sounds doable in a day. Downside is: I don't have time tomorrow, since I need to go to a 2 clients, and finish some work there. Well, it's money, that's important.

Tile edging works

Today I managed to push myself to finish off the code to calculate all the proper edges for each tiles. It was a tedious job, as it was a giant block of if statements and bitwise ORs and ANDs to determine which side was connected.

The code is ugly, but there wasn't much alternative to it. These pieces of code are in the category of "Never touch it again". And that's exactly what I'm going to do: Not touching it anymore, since it's working perfectly.

For those of you who want to see it all in action:
Looks sexy eh? It contains all the tiles, and shows how smooth each tile is getting the right edge, including the tiles that rely on a specific underground(Such as mountains).

The todo list for the editor is now down to:
- Add New Map dialog
- Saving
- Loading
- Adding a 3x3 brush, to quickly cough up large areas
- Use the statusbar to display some information about the map, such as height, width.
- Autosave function for automaticallly save unsaved work every 5 or 10 minutes in a special temp file.

I was thinking about adding a minimap, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do that. If I am going to do it, I need to do it in WinForms code, since I can't render outside the D3D panel, and it would be annoying to show the minimap in the editor screen itself. I'm probably going to leave it out for now, but I can always add it in, it's not something that requires a complete overhaul all the sudden.

Editor delayed

Due to a very high workload for college, I'll have to move the completion of the editor by a week. In my original planning, I wanted to finish(and perhaps release) the editor by the end of the week.

However, there is just too much work to be done for school, that I'll have to postpone it. I rather not work on my private projects, than fail any of my school projects.

Tomorrow morning I have a presentation for one of the school projects(In fact, I have less than 3 hours before my alarm goes off, but I can't sleep). Next week I have another presentation and I have to get some work graded.

I also have to complete some work for a few clients, so I rather give those jobs a higher priority. Coming week I except to:

• Finish the editor
• Release some ideas on how I want to approach a few problems
• Release a more accurate project goal
• Come up with some design models

Tune in coming tuesday for more updates.

Map Editor nearing completion

The mapeditor is nearing it's completion. It was quite fun to develop, and it's a bit of a shame I'm almost done with it.

There are some radical changes in it, such as that I stepped of the DirectInput mouse. At my first attempt, I attempted to initialize DirectInput for the mouse, and use that to handle the input. Problem was: I had to make up a fancy way to detect wether or not the mouse exited from the rendering area and unacquire(). In the end, it turned out the mouse was moving faster in Windows than it was under DirectInput(strange?), so I stepped off the DInput mouse.

I know process the MouseEnter, MouseLeft, MouseMove and MouseClick events off the panel where Direct3D renders in. Then I call a class member function of the TileBrush to set the new position of the square. When the mouse leaves or enters the area, I either make the square visible or invisible, so the little square doesn't sit at the corners doing nothing. This is how it looked liked:

That's quite sexy eh? This screenshot also shows the TileBrush in action. The TileBrush class is responsible for drawing tiles into the map, and to check if it needs to draw some extra tiles. For instanece, if I want to draw a Spice Dune(The dark area in the screenshot), it has to be in the middle of a spice field. To accomplish this, I first check if all 8 tiles surrounding the tile are of the required tile type. If not, I set them, and after that, I finally add the tile itself.

It's funky, but not completely flawless. I can still place those tiles, and replace all the spice with sand. My next entry contains how I solved it.

When I made the brush work, I wanted to go to bed. I just had to implement scrollbars, and make them work. Scrolling is simple: The horizontal scrollbar has a maxvalue of map.Width - map.ViewPortSize.Width, and the same for the vertical scrollbar. When the bars are scrolled, I can then just set the viewport positions. Simple, yet very effective. This is the final result:


Now I only need to work out an algorythm to round of the edges of the tiles(so they don't look all squary), remove certain tiles if they're not surrounded by their required tile, show some map information, make a "New Map" dialog and loading/saving.

Map Editor on the way!

One of the basic things in Dune II was the map. So I decided to dedicate myself first at making a proper mapformat, have it load and look good.

I first started with a normal WinForms app, but soon decided I needed to share a lot of common information between this and my ingame map class. So I decided to have my editor use Direct3D itself for the map rendering, and shove all the map specific things(And probably more) into a common DLL.

Right now, I have the DLL and the normal game working again, and I was working on integrating it all into the editor, when I decided I needed to install my Windows 2003 server(I now had access to a spare monitor and keyboard and the space to set it up).

So, I installed it, and at the moment, I'm installing all the necessary services on it, and then continue to install Apache, PHP, MySQL en Subversion on it. So I can host some sites, do work for clients and run Subversion of the server. Then I can free up some space and resources on my own machine.

Too bad this prevents me from doing more work on the editor and the game, but it's important to get it running.

Incorporated ToolEngine and got the mouse working.

Yesterday I integrated my existing 3D engine into the Dune II Remake project. I changed the Engine class a bit to support 2D operations using the Microsoft.DirectX.Sprite class. However, I added all the functionality directly into the Engine class, which seems a bit bad. The same class, for both 2D and 3D. I'll split them out in a Engine2D and an Engine3D class later this week.

After that, I spent some time reviewing my old InputManager code, and to be honest, it was quite solid. I added in a little bit of code to initialize both the keyboard and the mouse, and experimented a bit with the CooperativeFlags. I still haven't figured out if I want to go with Exclusive or NonExclusive, but at the moment, I use NonExclusive, and I don't really like it.

After the mouse worked, I added a simple class to render the mouse pointer to the screen. It works, but without transparancy. I did specify Palet entry 0 as transparancy, but for some reason, it still shows the black I used in the bitmaps. Trying to figure out why.

If I got some more time tonight(Which I doubt, because there's a giant pile of dishes to do since yesterday I had my birthday), I want to add in a first unit, the trike. I want to create a Unit class, then derive a Vehicle class from that(Because there are also infantry units) and then try using some sort of config file for the units.

Or I might try to whip up a map loader and editor, because at the moment, I don't really have any good map that I can use. I might try to work out the format for the Dune II: The maker maps, and use those until I can whip up my own format and editor.

First entry :)

I've decided to start blogging the development progress of my Dune II clone, so here I am.

I decided to use Blogger instead of my own journal system mainly because I use my own site for business purposes now, and having my journal on in, while not linked to on the mainpage is a bad idea.

In this journal I will keep to shed light on the status of the project, share ideas, screenies, progress and development decisions.

At the moment I don't have much to share, except that I just started development, and that for once, I want to try and finish the project. Perhaps having some audience to "encourage" me will keep me motivated, esp. when people are sharing their ideas with me.