Warscale - Equipment editor 2 (w/shots)

Hi everybody still reading my posts!
Again, a very productive week.
In a previous post I mentioned the agreement to use artwork from Jonathon Earl Bowser. The main idea is that the screens should float above the art but shouldnt really affect it. The backgrounds will be picked at random when the game starts and will be used during all the current session. A new set of artwork willl be picked the next time you run the game. The artwork must stand out so the GUI should be minimalistic but at the same time should stand out over the art colors.

What was planned
More equipment for the equipment editor
I managed to add about 16 new piedes of equipment including weapons and armor. I wanted to include more art but the Medieval Weapon pack requires some small tweaks to make it work properly. I guess it should be easy to do but I lack the experience so I will do that later. Anyway I was able to add like 8 new weapons and 8 new clothing which brought the equipment count to 20. Not bad at all.

Improved clothing management
Besides being able to use boots and gloves, the equipment manager now accepts two layers of armor. This way I can have a chainmain under the breastplate.

Action messages
Right now the GUI shows the actions executed during the game. Still work to do but it works.

Model store
I'm workin on this right now. I spent a lot of time trying to decide how to present the information. On the end it got a look very similar to the Army editor. I'm still coding it.


What wasnt planned
Transparent equipment
I spent a lot of time trying to make transparent materials work with the MACK. Unfortunately there is a bug somewhere (Milkshape or dtsExporter) which prevents me to export this. I wanted to use this option to customize more equipment.

Equipment separation
MACK brings up a lot of items but they have to be separated one by one. A long tedious process but it worked. Now I have a lot of DTS shapes thay I can use.

Using MACK instead of Kork
I used a lot of time in this one. There were many problems to solve. The first one was to change the object definitions so that Kork was no longer the player avatar. This came with new problems.

Multiple setSkinName in a single call
The equipment editor allows to select new equipment but this equipment needs to be setup and some textures swapped. But when I tried to swap the textures it just didnt worked. It took me a long time to understand the problem. When you call setSkinName in the server side, the name of the texture is stored and a dirty flag is set so that when the network packs the updates, the new texture name is sent.
The problem here is that it is not an inmediate process, you have to wait for the message to be dispatched before you call setSkinName again. So if you call like setSkinName 5 times in a row, only the last update will be executed, the others just get discarded.
The solution here was to add a monitor variable that I may query in order to see if the messages had been already sent so I knew when to try the next update. It works fine now.

Fixing the unit info view
Other problem with these changes was that when the mouse pointer moves over a unit, it should be loaded in the mini view in the lower left portion of the screen. The problem is that MACK is just too large and each time it was loaded it took just too long (waiting 1 second or it to load and show is too long). So I was forced to modify the GUI in order to be able to preload the avatar in a special GUIObjectView which gets visible when the avatar is pointed. When another creature is pointed, the ObjectView of the avatar is hidden and the ObjectView of the other creature is loaded with the appropiate mesh. This systems works just fine.


Screenshots!
The first screenshot shows the euipment editor with more equipment and the avatar dressed with a full chain mail, a breastplate and two swords. If you notice it has gloves and boots too.


The second shot shows the same avatar in game with all the selected equipment.



The plan for this week
Finish the marketplace
This week I will try to finish the marketplace in order to allow the players to but or sell new units and equipment. If possible, I will try to improve the other editors as well. A lot of work to do in this area yet... thats why I feared these editors a lot.

Coordinate the client/server code
This should be the final monster to slay. Starting from this week, I will start the sincronization of the client/server code. This should be fairly easy I hope but I want to test this extensively.

I may say that Warscale, as a prototype, is almost finished.

Luck with all your projects!
Guimo