The Chosen

While the new mouse engine did fix countless obvious bugs and prevent lots of future headaches, that’s not to say that it didn’t come with a few bugs of its own. To start, because the new system was repositioning the now invisible mouse cursor to the center of the screen, it had some issues that arose whenever I would try to move the window from its default loading location. I also have to convert all of the old mouse action code to flow through the new mouse system. In addition, because the new mouse engine locks the cursor inside the window, i added a procedure to unlock the cursor when pause to allow the user to exit the exit or perform other tasks when necessary.I also fixed a bug that popped up that was throwing the scroll engine into overdrive ever since I started painting the cursors with the graphics engine. After finishing all of that, and finalizing the new mouse engine I made one final change and fixed some of the liking for use hovering and mouse cursor sensors to show off some of the new cursors. At this point the new mouse engine and taken the full load and has completely replaced the stock old one, which leaves me with no other choice but to move on to bigger and better, and cooler tasks.

After completing the scroll engine, and implementing a working pause system, I found myself at a decent stopping point to take a break and collect my thoughts. However, I found that I was very pleased with the progress so far, and after a brief break, I jumped back in by working up a list of tasks, that still need to be done. I knew that there was still a lot to do, but apparently it may still be a while before official version 1 is released. I knew that eventually I would have to to do some serious optimizations to the graphics engine, but decided to put that off for a while longer to see how long I could live with the simple version. The actual task list proved to be more that even I remembered. (more…)

Maybe it’s my new duel 24″ monitors, or maybe it’s my recent day off work for jury duty. Whatever it is, it has seriously got me motivated to make some progress on this RTS. I just put some finishing touches on my scroll engine, including an ability to scroll by holding the right-mouse button. That feature is very cool, and the development went very smoothly. I also added a scroll limiter to prevent scrolling off the screen. While a scroll limiter does prevent the cool no clipping effect, it is necessary to keep the player from scrolling way off the map. (more…)