YARGH! Post Mortem

I enjoyed that, that was a fun weekend
Course not everything went to plan, but a number of things did, and after having had a few nights sleep, I can reflect over things with a clearer mind.
So click the link below for more details!

Tha Booty!
Quite a lot of things worked out this time.
The graphics were actually passable for a change! Though the tiles could do with a bit of work as I didn’t do them in any sane manner ( each were done seperately as a unique 64×64 image.. it’s magic that most of them fit together! Well, magic and the power of GIMP’s rotate tool 😉 )

The idea was fairly simple as well: capture all the forts!
The process being a bit more involved, but not by much.. you start off near an island with one ship, a full set of crew, and 1000 gold.
Capture forts, use their gold to make more men and ships, and repeat. Occaisionally finding chests for extra booty, or risking the mines for even more.
Of course, there are five other “beards” in the area doing the same thing, along with the “non-beards” ( the neutral/mutinyed crews. )
Course, it didn’t quite go to plan ( as described below in The Scurvy! ) but, actually, a lot of that is in there, just not fully wired up.

Although there’s not a great deal of game there, it is still somewhat amusing to fiddle with the amount of units the AI gets, and see how quickly they decimate one another!

Tha Scurvy!
Unfortunately, a fair amount went quite wrong.

This will be the last use of my engine in it’s current state.
It’s just too clunky to continue use, as I had to do a fair amount of dodgy hackery for things to work.
It buffered mouse input, for instance.. so that when the game lags, it queues it up and goes mad!
It also has to do a rather obscene amount of redirection to get it from the input system to Lua in the first place.
The keyboard also wasn’t helping much as it wasn’t picking up half the keys, and I had to write custom “debouncers” to deal with key presses. Yuck.

The renderer part isn’t exactly optimised either as it will draw each one of those tiles individually, rather than do them in batches of the same type.

Design wise, I did my usual madness of making the scope perhaps a bit too much. Though I dare say that without the oversleeping and engine bugs, I more than likely would’ve got the game done – minus menus and sound.. it’s not far off it as it stands.

Tha Plank!
There’s still a lot of feedback missing, as pointed out by xeon06 in the current comments. When you move units about, they get queued up in a waypoint system, and there’s no real indication of that actually happening.
Ironically, there is a set of hud icons in the player sprite sheets.. but I didn’t get round to using them.

The map.
Done in a text editor.
By hand.
With a sheet of grid paper with reference codes for all the tiles.
Madness.
I need to build a tile editor 😉

To be honest, continuing it in it’s current form would be quite difficult due to the engine falling apart now.
It’s served me well, but it’s time for a new one!
That said, I still enjoyed making what I did, and it may not be as complete as I wanted, there’s still a fair amount there and you can see the direction I was heading

With any luck, a new engine will prompt me to actually finish these things!

Oh and in reply to Endurion about Trend Micro giving a false positive, it probably is just that.. the Windows build was done on a brand new squeaky clean install of Windows 7 that had just finished installing itself that morning, and has avast! anti-virus running on it and didn’t find anything.. if you’re wanting to be extra safe though, the source is there for you to recompile if you like.. you’ll need CodeBlocks to do it under Windows, and probably need to do some fix up to the .cbp project as I think I’ve removed event.cpp but not updated the project file.