Week 5

Submitted by

Mat on Sun, 2017-03-12 21:15

Guten Tag,

This week, my efforts were split between a couple of topics - trying out a few things, supporting the rest of the team with their work or preparing the framework for its next tasks, instead of focusing on any single topic. Running around in the woods of these tasks, I've started to feel like we're in the calm before the storm, but this is a storm we're all waiting for: the building blocks of the CoA and the Player Module are now visibly getting together and with some luck, we can start privately testing them in a week or two. A short, but very refreshing storm to come!

In the meantime, our weekly weather report:

^{BBAP screenshot - animation is so awkward it seems better as a static image :)}

Game Client

I spent some time on the Coat of Arms Creator - we were mostly testing Sándor's new artwork. We've also started to work on the CoA GUI, but Sándor had a short week, so that will for sure continue on Week 6.
Now that we're working on the GUI, I've put in some effort to provide some basic features we'll surely need there. I've added a somewhat minimalist, but relatively intelligent tooltip system (that won't show tooltips that are partially off-screen no matter where you open them) and in tandem with that, a set of extensions to the GUI code that makes it a lot easier to anchor, pivot or align GUI objects right from the code just as easy as you'd do it from a visual editor. This will come very handy for GUI elements we need to put on screen on demand and without a static position.

^{Tooltips are taking screen position into consideration when aligning to their context item.}

I've also made some tests on the BBAP scenes (for newcomers: it stands for Big Beautiful Animated Paintings). I had to realize my artistic skills are way below the required level to make them animate as cool as similar animated scenes do in games like Endless Legend or the loading screens of XCOM 2... but I can do something similar to what Civilization 6 did for it's victory screens. Which is pretty awkward - but at least there is space for improvements. Lots of space. I wish we had a Unity-capable animator on the team though...

^{These screens could be so beautiful if they are carefully animated *sigh*}

Platform & Game Server

Steve is slowly getting back to a full-time schedule, and has practically finished the main part of the Player Module. He is now separating and refactoring the code (I realized I've used the term a couple times now, but some might be unaware of it's exact meaning, so here is a politically incorrect, Deadpool-like definition: a not-yet-refactored code is like you when you have just barely woken up in the morning: more or less functioning, but you would not like anyone - or the mirror - to see you in that shape), adding a few extras, and it's ready for private tests with the client.

^{Coat Of Arms Module is getting ready...}

Website

I've probably forgot to properly add notes for this week, but I can't recall working too much on the website on Week 5. It's an eff-ing miracle, I tell you. An eff-ing miracle!

In the next episode

On the Game Client, I'll probably continue with the scene GUIs - Login, Register and CoA -, and other scene related features like multi-language support (localization) or continuing the work on scene loading & navigation. Now it's my turn to have a shorter week as both my oldest son and my wife have their birthdays in the coming week, and we have a national holiday in-between the two great birth days, so we'll see how far I get.

^{18 / R Tits can sell anything Fifty Shades of the Harpy}

In my free moments, I'll continue burning time (probably without great results :) ) on BBAP animations. It has to be done at some point...
On the Server, Steve will re-factor and make preparations for our internal tests. So he'll make sure his code will be properly dressed up for that on-coming storm.
Site: hopefully, the miracle continues.

^{Considering all the scratches, The Bard's Tale didn't end well for this guy.}