So most parts of the upcoming version 1.3.0 have been implemented. We are looking forward to a lot of debugging in the next weeks.
Editor
Ok, I should explain why we decided to add an ingame editor. As you probably know we added a new animation system. And this has a lot of settings. These can of course be controlled via C++ code. But this would take a lot of time, as we would need to recompile the code everytime we change something. And this takes a lot of time.
The editor will allow us to change the code while the game is running
To achieve this we implemented several sub goals:
Entity creation via XML and visual programming
Normally the entities in our game are create by C++ code. This can not be changed while the game is running. So we added a system which allows the creation of entities via XML. And the XML file is generated via visual programming. So for simple entities we will no longer need to write code.
Every entity consists of modules which communicate via events. State machines are also supported.
The necessary information is collected via reflection from the C++ code. Reflection in this case means that our program can analyse it's own structure. In Java and C# this is supported by the language itself. In C++ this isn't the case (I do not understand why, it would have saved us a lot of work). We had to augmented our code with additional informations.
Improved GUI
To be abled to display all the necessary information we needed additional GUI elements. So we implemented a tree view and a scroll box. We also corrected and updated the menu system.
Game control
The game can be pause, started in slow motion or single steps can be triggered via the editor. Cheats are also accessible.
Project viewer
We added a project viewer which displays all files which are accessible by the game.
Asset viewer
And we of course have an asset viewer. Currently it displays images and entities.
But we also did other stuff:
Sounds
I tried to record better environment sounds for the game. But in my home town I did not find a place where there is now noise (cars, people …). It it is really annoying if you think that we are constantly living with such a noise level.
Multiplayer
I also continued with multiplayer but this is clear as the network system will also use some kind of reflection system which is similar to the one use to create the entities.
Animations done
We added animations for the bear and the red deer. This are for the start basic ones.
What will come...
I hope that we soon can create our own entities in the game. I am very exited.
