Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I was determined tonight to get the game play working to at least the extent of being able to take turns placing peices on the board and do so properly. Since I had the maps all set to go once again I whipped up a testbed map in the editor and started working back on the game play code – loading the map properly for ingame play, setting up the players, etc. Behold the fruits of my labor!

Here’s the game loaded up with the testbed map I created in the editor. The main thing to note in this shot is the system in the lower right corner of the inner square. That’s a nebula hiding an opponent’s planet – you can see the faint outline in it

Unlike a previous entry where I showed off a map loaded in the game, now the cursor also recognizes when you’re hovering over a planet that is not your color, and won’t let you drop a peice there as well as anywhere on the board there are no squares and on asterioid fields (not shown in this map)

So the blue player places a planet on the board and the game passes control over to the green player. Note how now the blue player’s planet hides behind his nebula while the green player’s planet becomes visibile

Green places another peice over the one existing in the nebula, which sends control back over to blue

Blue takes control of the last empty system and pass control back to green – we now see that he has two peices placed in one system, as evidenced by the single ring around the planet. You can get up to 4 rings on a planet before…

Well that would have to wait until later now won’t it? I can’t tell you guys everything about the game all at once now can I? Where’s the suspense in that? But don’t worry, I plan to implement that part by or on Wednesday so you won’t have long to wait. I’ll also get to start playing with particles!! Wheee! I also have to add functionality for more special systems not shown in that map, although the ones that are shown (black hole and nebula) are functional.

In other news, I added a white board to my workspace

Save me some notepad paper! 😛

Also, I cleaned up my comps memory a bit today and I can totally tell the difference. I use AVG for virus scanning and I finally decided to turn off the resident shield and email scanner and all that crap – I know what to open and what not to open regarding emails and I haven’t had any sort of serious virus on any of my computers since those blasted boot sector viruses back when people still used 3.4″ floppies. Plus I do weekly scans anyhow. Secondly I discovered that MS Money 05 leaves these apps running after it shuts down that do nothing I care about – so I searched online and found out what to set in Money so they wouldn’t persist after the app exited. That saved me freakin ~20MB of memory for cripes sakes. Word of warning to any MS Money 05 users out there. Finally, I shut off a few of those uneeded XP services to free up a couple more megs. The result is that when the system loads I now have half of my RAM available (256MB) whereas beforehand I had closer to only 1/4. Yipes.

But that’s all for now – as you can see by the time I kind of want to go to bed… specially before my girl wakes up and yells at me. Women More updates hopefully by Wed!