That’s right. It’s here. The release you’ve all heard absolutely nothing about and thus couldn’t possibly have been waiting for!
Nevertheless, it is a very important release. Before this, creating a custom interface for your game involved modifying the engine code. Now there is a complete custom templating system that allows users to reuse engine interface components and control the style entirely via CSS. Drop a new game interface into the “gamedata” folder and it automatically starts working. Remove it and the engine interface starts up.
In addition to the interface templating system, the entire UI for the game engine (including all the reusable components) has been redesigned in XHTML 1.0 strict using CSS for the layout and style. Screenshots are available at SourceForge.net, or you can download it now and try it yourself.
Disclaimer: This is a development release. It has not been fully tested and is not meant for production use. The XHTML hasn’t been validated against the w3c parser yet either (it will be before v2).
As of tonight Amun final has been uploaded to the files section of the website. Some significant bug fixes have been implemented since the release of the beta, so you may wish to grab the new release asap. At this point, to the best of my knowledge, the game design interface and the ticking engine both do what they are supposed to. I’m also just as certain that more bugs will show up eventually; c’est la vie. Such is software development. I’ll squash them as I find them, but if you see one please send me an e-mail and I’ll fix it.
One might recall a previous post I made about upgrading to KDE4. One might also recall certain problems I had with KDE4. I didn’t mention then the full extent of it, but rest assured there were many problems, including my idle cpu usage being at around 90% for one core and 60% for the other core. I finally figured out what was causing the majority of the problems: A ridiculously poorly made little widget that checks for new messages in a few different applications. I thought it would be handy. Instead it made my desktop unusable. Now KDE4 is running quite nicely, with my idle processor usage being at around 5-10% per core.
On another note, development of my game is going quite well. For those interested, I intend to release the game engine under the Gnu General Public License version three. The game content itself will not be so freely available, for which I apologize. I am torn between my want to give developers the ability to use my code and the need to make some sort of profit off my software. This is the compromise I have reached. I hope it is satisfactory to all. You will have free access to the code, to do with as you please (even make your own commercial game if you so choose) as long as you release your own code. I ask nothing in return except that you please not attempt to copy my own game content. It would be unethical.
The project is moving along on schedule. In the past few days I have put together several hundred lines of Python code which includes the database description (models in Django which are translated into tables by Django’s code), a script to add test content to all the fields in the database, and several functions within the ticking engine. I am currently at work on the combat system. It is, even more so than I would have imagined, a very tricky process. So many comparisons to do, so many choices to make. Who does each ship attack? A random target within its weapon class match? Do ships alternate between opponents? Should I take an event percentage of ships from each adversary? What about possible bonuses to attack damage and defense from each opponent ship? Should I take a lower percentage from those better defended? Or should I send more attacks against those more heavily armed? And most importantly, how do I decide all this in an efficient manner?
I’ll be honest. It is giving me headaches. I could easily program a brute force method for any of the above. What I need is an efficient way to do any of them. I believe I shall settle on taking an even percentage of ships from each adversary. This is after almost two days of considering the ups and downs of each aspect of the problem. I think I can code that in a relatively efficient way: Which is to say, I think I can code that in a way that does not require O(n) loops, where n is the number of ships involved in the combat. I can instead perform generalizations about the groups, and have less calculations and comparisons required. This pleases me.
Well I’ve rambled enough for one day. Adios my friends.
Tonight I went through the painstaking effort of upgrading to KDE 4 and trying to make it do things the way I want. After spending hours trying to make it look the way I wanted it to and failing, I then settled upon a fallback look that suits me well enough. KDE 4 seems like a lovely piece of work, but it also shows many signs of how new it is. Erratic behavior with the panels, settings that can’t be changed, bars that can’t be resized, etc. Still, all in all it was worth getting the install over with.
I’ve also been redoing my articles bit by bit, fixing up the HTML (it was originally copied quickly from the sites where it was published with no regard for syntax or readability) and adding them as WordPress pages. They aren’t all done yet, but I’m working on them. When I’ve converted the ones which are currently listed I’ll start doing some searching and see if I can locate any more articles out there. No, I didn’t save them all. I should have. Now I have to track them down.
