Update on progress on 0.9.2

[Implode]

Its been a while since I made a post on progress. Probably the key thing I wanted to do for 0.9.2 was (and unfortunately its something totally invisible with no noticable effect) to completely rewrite the way the comms messages are generated, sent and processed between the client & server, for two big reasons:
1) Messages on the client typically had to be queued up so that e.g. it doesn't try to kill off a unit while the graphics are still showing an animation of the doom bolt about to land on its head. I had to write this queuing separately for every single type of message, which was a real pain in the parts, so only messages where I had identified a definite situation which could cause a crash were queued up. This I believe was one of a major causes of instability. In the new comms module, queueing of messages, processing messages and showing graphical animations are totally integrated, so all messages are queued automatically without me having to write something specific to do it.
2) The format of the data sent wasn't explicitly defined, which would have made it difficult to port the server to Java. Now every comms message is defined as an object, I could (almost) copy and paste them all into Java.

I naively thought the above wasn't going to take me very long ;) But I had to redefine every comms messages, how every one was processed, and the biggest job was merging the animation code into the messages which was previously all separate. After having a nightmare with doing Fog of War in 0.9.1, where I was months without the code being able to compile, I was determined I wanted to avoid another similar massive change... yet that's exactly what I ended up with.

Anyway, its done now, although largely untested & some of the anims I know won't quite work yet, but at least it means I feel like I'm making some progress again. So I've put up a couple of new screenshots, showing that you will be able to create new games from the client (I tried to make the style as close as possible to the new game screen in the original MoM... just with lots more options), and also that I've moved the Combat Scale setting into the client options screen.

A note about this - one of the things I wanted to try with MoM IME was, in moving from 320x200 resolution to 640x480, rather than doubling the size of all the combat graphics, 4x the number of figures instead, so High men swordsmen have 24 figures per unit instead of 6. And also to be able to switch this off for single, large summoned creatures like Sky Drakes - it just looks much cooler seeing your tiny army being completely dwarfed by a massive dragon :) It looked great, but meant that I was going to have to rebalance the game at some point - Longbowmen/Slingers with 24/32 figures per unit are going to make mincemeat out of Sky Drakes with a single figure. So at some point I was going to have to completely redo all the unit stats to make the game fair using this combat scale, which wasn't a job I was looking forward to.

Instead I had the relevation a few days ago of making the combat scale simply a graphical option, so it doesn't affect gameplay at all. So now the server/rules don't care what option you pick - as far as its concerned, those bowmen still only have 6 figures per stand, and they still only fire 6 arrows - just the visual appearance is of 24 figures firing 24 arrows. This also means you can play a game with different players using a different combat scale, just whatever they find visually most attractive. So I'm *much* happier with it working like this.

So... my guessed date for 0.9.2 of end of Sept still seems doable. It certainly shouldn't be much past that. There's not terribly much in it to get excited about, in terms of new features, but you should still all be happy that I'm making good progress :D

Implode.

[Coyote]

Sounds good to me. Cheers. :D

[Lucern]

The longest journey begins with a single step. You've had quite a few of those steps, and I'm glad to see consistent progress.

I was concerned with the balancing issues with the larger unit sizes, but I assumed that all units (save heroes) would get the same multiplier and roughly (if complexly) balance out. Heroes wouldn't need to be balanced out, because heroes are already too powerful :D Spells on the other hand...some spells would have been massively advantaged by the new system, particularly where they affect all members of a unit, or a battlefield.

I'm intrigued, nevertheless, about the idea of actually having units of that numerical size...

[Implode]

Update... I've finished making all-but-one of the changes, now I'm held up on testing. Its the first time I've tried to actually write a proper test script to test as much of the functionality as possible, but felt it was necessary for 0.9.2 since I've rewritten the comms layer, so I pretty much need to make sure I test every variation of every message to make sure the replacement works.

Its definitely providing worthwhile though - I've found & fixed 4 bugs just with starting & joining games already, before I even start on movement/cities/spells/combat. So maybe in a week I'll have 0.9.2 ready. And in a week's time... I'll say it'll be ready in week ;-) Actually since I've not written a big test script for it like this before, its hard to guess how long it'll take. I'll have a better idea when I see how much I get done over the weekend.

Implode.