'The state of things' was a pretty dense description of what has been written, code wise. Let's get into the more recent work, actual progress on the actual game.
Rather than a list, let's just say what we have.
We have a zone that runs a scenario. Players can connect to the zone, and are then given several dialogs to select a team and commander type. AI players will be created to fill out any empty teams. The scenario specifies the team count, typically 2 but it will work with any number. When the scenario begins the commanders will move to a spawn point, summon their primary units, and they'll enter a combat state. If they enter proximity with an enemy unit they'll begin an attack sequence. The user can execute a couple different 'AI' actions, which tell the units where to go and how to act. This is all pretty simple stuff, but clearly necessary.
More time has been spent on the unit development. We've come up with a relatively detailed design for the primary unit types, how they develop, how they act, and what control the user has over them. Primaries develop with a simple class system; Each class has 10 ranks, each rank may grant new abilities and attributes. Some of these are allowed to be permanent improvements, which continue to take effect after the primary changes class. Some classes have prerequisites on other class ranks. This forms a fairly wide tree of possible primary unit types.
The intent for the primaries is that they are your group's customization. Selection of which class they are (and which they have been in the past) determines your ability selection. It also determines how you'll want to build formations and develop your commander. The commander's development methodology is not as well determined or implemented as of yet, but the plan is to use a fairly simple skill system. Commanders focus on formations, managing morale, and utilizing territory, rather than styles of attacks and defenses. This makes them a bit more complicated to design, but more interesting as well.
We started designing each primary class in the generic server editor, but quickly ran into a scalability problem. The editor was not designed for mass data entry. Even just the 4 introductory classes would require 50 states and 40 actions, almost all of which are identical but for small changes. Since we want there to be a wide variety of primary types, this had to be resolved.
So we started building a file to store all our data in, which we would parse, and then construct the gamedata from. This is remarkably easy with the World as it is. Next, since now I'm not the only one working on the system, we decided to make this file sharable and easily to collaborate on. So we uploaded it to google docs. Next, I decided that downloading the file, processing, and running it, was entirely too cumbersome, so we wrote some code to do all that automatically.
So now we have an online document, and the system automatically builds the classes from it. This is very cool. Trust me. We expanded the file to include action declarations, state descriptions, class data, and some commander data as well.
So great! We've got some data. Creating a new class is wonderfully straightforward; add its abilities and states into the doc, make the class ranks, and rebuild. Takes about 10 minutes. Sure, there isn't a client to actually play with them yet, but that'll get here soon.
About this time someone mentioned how cool it would be to have a simulator to test class balance. That sounded fun, so I wrote it. Continuing on from the previous kick, I decided that we'd use another google doc to store the sim inputs. And heck, why not just spit it back out into the spreadsheet as well? Oh, and since we're using a scheduler for all the operations, why not just fake the timing so that it runs at 100% CPU, instead of waiting for realtime to pass? Sure, why not?
So we have a single program now, that reads in the class data from online, builds the class data, actions, and states, then runs every single class rank against every other class at the same rank, 100 times, then spits the output back to a google spreadsheet. 100 fights takes about 7 seconds, so the current testing spreadsheet (about 70 comparisons, 100 iterations each) takes a couple minutes. But that's 7000 fights! You can watch the spreadsheet just fill in with data. Make a small tweak; rerun just one line, test the output, and repeat! It's addictive. I think I'll go make a new class now, just for fun.
Wait, maybe I should make the game playable.
Nah, the sim's good enough. We'll just play that.
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