Progress Update 24/04/16

Hello one and all!

So the time has come again for a status update. This week has been pretty busy, but in a very frustrating way. I've spent the largest part of this week's coding time bugfixing and finessing a new system, so the tangible "look wot I did" progress isn't very high, though the modding potential is huge.

Previously I had pre-programmed into the engine for it to start you off with a full, generic set of 1000 soldiers distributed as you would expect. This was obviously not ideal to have as a fixed pattern and needed to be changed.

So now, we have what I'm calling Regiment Scripts. Regiment scripts are going to be selected at the time of regiment creation. These are plain text files formatted specifically to procedurally generate large numbers of soldiers in set formations. This is done by issuing block commands for a given list of stats - numbers pulled from the mod's equipment data files - and repeated until the proper formation is satisfied.

For instance, there could be a "1000 soldiers in 10 companies of 10 soldiers plus support staff" script - which is what I've been experimenting with - or a "recovering band of only 200 soldiers but a large fleet spread across the sector" script. The possibilities are ultimately endless.

The scripting isn't quite finished yet as there is no support for location, vehicles, fleet and some other unimplemented parts of the engine. But for everything that is currently implemented, it will allow for complete user control. I will produce a general document in the coming week to describe how to create these scripts simply and quickly, or I may just create a little tool to do it visually, I'm unsure yet.

There have also been some significant graphical update allows for a much nicer-looking regiment managerment interface, as shown below:

This is all generated from the current test script at runtime, and cna be changed to suit the specific game's needs. This is all part of the process of adding regiment creation to the engine.

By next week I hope to have implemented the full and proper regiment creation screen, and have worked through my backlog of additional art inclusions - we have new planets, a starmap rather than a solid black background, new system for buttons along the bottom, and some updated main menu buttons. All in all, next week should be a reasonably sized release and one step closer to a playable engine.

That's all for now,
Peace out