Week 8

Submitted by

Mat on Mon, 2017-04-03 00:58

Hæ,

Week 8 has come and gone without ever saying "hi" - and it's not the first time either. Just like last week, I once again thought we were a week ahead and started this entry as 'Week 9'.

In retrospect, this week seemed to be a classic mule of our development progress (in terms of being so-so in many aspects). While we've reached a few important internal milestones and we should be generally happy, for some odd - and only partially understandable - reasons most of us defined the week as one of our less satisfactory ones.

For one, GUI development has been falling to the annoying topics this week. We've more or less achieved what we aimed at for the week, but it just felt painful. I guess we all rather wanted to work on the things next to this step already. Our site has also tricked us a couple times. We've replaced a module and at first it seemed to be surprisingly painless. Then it turned out a few modules and visuals were making erratic behaviour due to the newly-integrated one. Still, we now have a more advanced poll system, so we've started the Your Turn initiative.

"Your Turn" is basically the quickest way to re-balance our development to your priorities. I'm pretty sure Mark will speak about it more... shortly. For the moment, help us out by suggesting our ideal course.

In the meantime, let's review the facts from this week.

Game Client

DONE Coat of Arms related graphic assets & their testing are ready. Sándor is already fully focused on the GUI elements and the two initial BBAPs.
I've made further tweaks on the Player Module GUIs.
Also improved a couple UI building blocks like our underlying tooltip system (it is now properly "shared" between all scenes and it's lifecycle is fully automated) or our customized inputs (like our reusable, styled base classes for buttons and various textboxes), and made some tweaks to our scene management code. Font assets had a complete overhaul too.

^{Polished elements, a new tooltip visual - most improvements lie in the details. What is your toughts? Elegant or amateurish?}

Platform & Game Server

DONE Steve's Player Module implementation, at least from the milestone's standpoint, is ready. This means it is capable of doing everything that is needed for a player to use our clients (game login, logout, registration, password recovery, account uniqueness checks, etc.) and for us to integrate it to the site.
Player Module Admin views are still work in progress (those are important for staff members without coding skills).
He has started to integrate Coat of Arms persistency (storing, caching and uniqueness checks) related features to the server.

Website

I've (hopefully) fixed a Chrome/IE/Edge incompatibility for the social buttons. You don't wanna know the details.
We've also integrated a new poll system, as the previous one didn't support multiple choices, anonymous voting or write-ins. We hope this one will be more useful and can be used as a cornerstone of our "Your Turn" initiative. It took a bit more than two days to eliminate every issue (at least the ones we found) regarding the underlying structure, the new views and classes, and the migration of our older polls. Still, if you find bugs, please report them!

^{Your Turn. Hopefully it's hard enough to miss (also available from any article or news).}

Coming Next

Client: as much as I can do from the following tasks:
- finishing and setting up the navigation pattern for the scenes that will be in the first early preview release & unifying the visuals of their UI blocks.
- fixing any remaining issues with the CoA creator scene & finalizing CoA caching on client side.
- linking the client's CoA generation workflow to the server.
Server:
- Steve is going to finish the CoA related data structure and features, and hopefully also create the basics for the collectibles.
- Other than that, hopefully he will have time to put the server up to a public beta host so he can integrate the Player Module to the site.
Site: nothing. Maybe except that Player Module integration.
Game Assets: full focus on the remaining GUI and BBAP.

^{The last shipment of the assets, like wavy lines have arrived. What would you do with three wishes?}