Updates

[FreakNigh]

Okay I spent all day trying to tweak a new production menu out of defragens design and I couldn't. The main issue is his design is it is designed to make selecting units faster. However because not all the units can fit in a 3x3 you would need something like a 3x6 which is huge. I made a 3x6 and it was simply too large. So if you used the 3x3 you'd need scrolling and that defeats the purpose. Also it is important that the original design is available by default and his design does not transition well.

So I thought about it and we really don't need a fast selection, the mouse scroll is pretty sufficient. What we do need is the ability to quickly set to your "preferred default" and the ability to set a building queue. Mainly a queue is needed so that you can do something like tell your fort to build a crane without canceling something or changing the build cycle (just stick one crane in the queue and let it end and repeat with what it was already building). Or maybe that jeep is 90% and you'd rather tell the factory to start cycling heavies after the jeep instead of canceling it.

So after 8 hours of hell because I am not a graphics designer I give, whoever you are or aren't, this -

http://zod.sourceforge.net/screenshots/production_expanded_test.png

[FreakNigh]

The interest level in this game at this point in development is a little too low to be working for free on it.

[Beatonator]

The interest level in this game at this point in development is a little too low to be working for free on it.

I do understand though. There is only a handful of people around really. How many downloads have you clocked up?

[FreakNigh]

I dunno the sourceforge counter is broken. I need to email them about it.

[FreakNigh]

The big overhaul for the new expanded production window is now done.. Also I want to make it so if you are selecting a unit you can click the portrait and a big menu showing all the choices will come up and then you just select one. The overhaul was that I had to separate the selector code so I might finish the portrait selector first.

[FreakNigh]

Here is a video of the quick selector.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hea5M_4LL0I

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zod/files/windows_releases/zod_engine_installer-2011-07-03.exe/download

http://zod.sourceforge.net/screenshots/full_unit_selector.png

[FreakNigh]

The building queue lists are almost done. The client side code is done so you can add and remove items from the queue, now I just have to make the server use them and debug.

[FreakNigh]

Here it is!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zod/files/windows_releases/zod_engine_installer-2011-07-07.exe/download

I will make a video and a linux release for this tomorrow...

Here is the info about it from the readme file -

New Production Window -
While you are selecting a unit you can click the portrait to bring up a large selection window with all of the available choices. You can also use the mouse scroll to cycle through the choices quickly. On the upper right of the window there is a [+] which when clicked will expand the window for the factory production queue. Here you can set the list of units to be built. If no units are in the list then after the current production nothing will be made. The last unit on the list will always be repeated. To remove a unit from the list simply click it.

Let me know if there are any bugs with it. I sudo fixed one bug where the engine would try to access map data when it wasn't yet loaded... I need to think about that one a little more.

[FreakNigh]

Here is a video of the build orders - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY-F1l5qtYA

[Beatonator]

Sweet as!

I think my biggest gripe is that as a rule no one bothers with anything except Medium tanks and Pyros. Anything else gets trounced by Pyros and Mediums. I know its due to their build time. Just seems like there is no use in advancing past a certain tech level. I would love to see if we can try to balance it so that the bigger units are genuinely used more.