I have added unit order queuing and some simple code to show those orders so now the units can be moved through multiple waypoints effortlessly. I’ve also added the distinction to separate your units from enemy units, and adjust the cursor icon as necessary. This also includes code to prevent you from moving or mass selecting enemy units. I haven’t incorporated actual teams yet, which will allow for allied units that are not yours to control, but not enemies to attack, but that will be the next addition. I’ve added some minimal code to link the GUI to the action by showing the currently selected units in the bottom left of the screen, giving a count for each unit type and listing every unit. I’ve added code to allow the game to be played at any resolution, and even full screen, but for now the game will remain at a constant windowed size. I’ve added a splash screen. Recently, I’ve added the text display part of the GUI that will inform you of unit completion or base attacks. This has all been added and tested but still needs a little tweaking and I will probably incorporate much of it into the current scripting system, but that’s a task for another day.

All in all, I am bummed out that I can t spend much more time on this, but it does give me something to look foreword to when I finish the other projects I’m currently vested in.

Knowing that a major overhaul was gonna be necessary on my server’s design, I figured that now would be as good a time as any to design a new server structure that incorporated a complete database back end, as well as data protection and more sophisticated client management interface. Not entirely sure what would be necessary in the RTS database, I made the tough decision to put the RTS engine on hold while I dedicated my designing, coding and testing a completely new sever structure.

I started by once again trying to get a JDBC client to run, this time with the HSQLDB package. My past attempts at getting the JDBC working all failed miserably so this time I was absolutely determined to get it working. I sat down expecting a big fight to get it up and running and much to my surprise, this time it just worked. With very little fight at all I got a small test app setup and running just like I would like. After a very brief celebration, I began writing a new server.

While it would be nice to just be happy about the new server and start implementing it into the RTS, I would rather see the design tested in some working environment to ensure that this structure will, in fact, do what I need it to do. I eventually decided that I would use pieces of my old chess program to create a new stratego program to use the new server. The concept is an entire tabbed interface where users login, chat in the lobby, join as many games as they want, and play stratego with other players over the internet, with all the traffic running through my server of course. Most of the networking and database code is complete and working but there is still a lot that need to be fixed and/or improved in the client side code. As of right now, it is entirely playable but still has a few code bugs that need to get worked out, and some design issues that need to get fully implemented before I release it beta group. More news will be posted on FreshProgramming.com.

The whole reason I had to design and implement a new mouse engine was because the addition of units before was seriously conflicting with the old mouse engine. With this new mouse engine working perfectly in the RTS I was then free to change my focus back to the units. Before this big haste, I had units, and they were clickable, and even movable. Of course all of this fancy movement was a direct location change and not a fancy, slow, speed based movement, and all of the selection and move orders only worked at the origin view location. Basically, interacting with units didn’t work after scrolling and the movement was actually more like a teleport. However, all of that has been changed now. (more…)

With the new mouse engine I have added modifiers for numerous things that I could not have controlled before such as mouse sensitivity and also allows me to handle all mouse actions a new all in one procedure. Because the new mouse engine is running from within the Java I can directly what happens when the mouse is pressed and no longer have to worry about mouse listeners or which object is on focusable or anything else. With this great progress I hope do some more work with the units soon.

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After months of coding and design, the game is finally taking shape as I can now handle units on the screen. I put several finishing touches on the selection system and the scroll system to prep the RTS for another build. Also I have recently added numerous new script variables to a root script file that allows my other developers and I to very easily tweak the code before it runs. I added script variables for screen size, tile size, an array of GUI/mouse interaction variables, nearly all variables involved in the scroll system, and even variables to set preferred frame rates in the graphics engine. I am still amazed at just how helpful these script variables can be, and how they make the designing of the game much more simple and enjoyable.

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Finaly I’m done with the scripting portion of the GUI. Though I’m sure that I will need to modify a thing of two as I start witting other code to interact with the GUI, but still it feels like a big accomplishment. While finishing touches on my script code for the GUI, I was also working on the cursor animation engine which is also up and running beautifully. Sadly, because the cursors are automatically removed from the screen shot, my cool animated cursors don’t appear in the picture, but I assure you they are very cool. In almost no time at all, after minimal explanation, I was able to hand off the script files to my game designer and he was able to construct his own version of the GUI as seen above. He was also able to modify the new cursors file, and using a constant code base, work with multiple new cursors and see how they looked in the real engine. Before I knew it, he had completely redesigned by default test GUI (bellow) into something that looks much yet functions exactly the same.

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