Warscale - Editors integration complete

Hi everybody!

This was an awesome week for me. I had a great time with my family and there was also a good development on Warscale.

One of the nice things was that my HP laptop has came back from the dead, not fully restored and there is still a rotten smell yet, but lively enough to be useful again!

[rant]
If you remember the videocard died and Windows Vista 64 kept complaining about the nVidia driver and crashed with a blue screen from time to time. Well it looks like I wasnt alone. Apparently HP did something really wrong and a lot of their laptops series dv2000, dv6000 and dv9000 (like mine) have started to give the same kind of problems so they decided to clean their mess. Looks like the problem started with an update to Windows Vista which somehow broke the video card support and sent the driver crashing. So HP has issued a BIOS update in order to workaround the problem, nVidia has published a new set of drivers for the nVidia Go series and along with the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (which by some reason Windows Update didnt auto update) plus some more Vista updates completed the fix.
[/rant]

Shouldnt those tags be added to the scripting system?

So, the laptop is working again and it even runs TGE again! I havent tested the shading units yet but Age of Empires III, my only installed game even when I never play it, wont run as it says it is not compatible with Vista64 (but previously it did). I need to do more tests but my wife wont let me because she is afraid something breaks again and her work is in that laptop. Anyway at least I can run the Warscale servers there when I need.

Progress
This past week I focused on the Equipment editor and the Model store. More bug fixes have been made on the Grid control and I hope they are final. I updated the interface, created new buttons and, of course, made it work with the servers. It was required to create some additional support screens like the Load/SaveAs, Message and Wait screens. A great part of the logic has been cleaned in client and server side. New network messages added to help coordinating the information and lots of checks have been added to the client so the information is validated prior to sending it to the server and in the server so it doesnt trust the information it receives and rechecks it. The DB functions have been debugged too. Sounds paranoid but when money is involved there should be lots of testing. I'm still afraid of the packets being somehow modified by a hacker but at least some protection has been included and I will leave ptimizations to the future.

A lot of thought was given again to the business model. In previous comments there was a discussion on the benefits of selling booster packs against an open unit list approach. I was forced to write my strengths/waeknessess table and on the end the open list won. Three of the main consideration were:
a. For a booster approach I need to complete a set before starting to sell the packs against just adding them as they are compete to the open list.
b. In a booster approach an extremely powerful item can break your game and you will need to ban its use (somebody said MTG Black Lotus?) against increasing its price in the open list.
c. In the open list I can create the Sword of you-dare-to-look-at-me-and-you-are-dead and price it at say, 1000000 gold pieces and it wont break the game because I can separate the players in game servers and allow people who wants to use this card to enter to the God Level server, while in a closed booster approach I just cant create this item on the risk of breaking the game.

That said, I plan to add a marketplace feature in the future so that the players are able to buy and sell their units at better prices than those provided by the store (which pay backs 50% of the unit price on a sale). For this to work, a minimal fee will be charged on each transaction like a 5% fee. Those ammounts will need to be adjusted appropiately to reach a nice balance.

By the way, I have planned to add a black lotus to the first set of units. If you will accuse me of copying MTG then read Conan stories first and you will see how many times the black lotus was used in Howard tales.

Screenshots
This week I can show you the editors with some of the additional confirmation screens.
Here is the Army editor and the SaveAs screen.

Here you have the Equipment Editor and some confirmation screens.

And finally the model store with more confirmation screens.

The plan for this week
Now that three of the major components of the game are working in place, I can continue work in the game. One of the most neglected parts of the game is the creation of the game. This is just a small window which should allow the player to create a new game or join a game in progress. It needs to allow to add a game name and game password, select the game type (single, multiplayer), how many players to allow and the army you want to use. Its a small screen but with lots of functions so I guess that will take me almost all of this week. If somehow I finish this window before the end of this week I will start with the battle lobby screen which is the place where the members of a game gather, chat and prepare before starting the battle.

Luck with your projects!
Guimo