Took a short break.. bought Diablo 3.. cursed Blizzard for a horrendous launch and servers being down.... got back to coding tonight..

So, the hand to hand portion is done.. I've made some adjustments to it and added in the variations based on game difficulty. I've also updated it so that I can use this portion of the gameplay in other parts of the game, swapping out backgrounds as needed.. Works quite nicely.. Just have to design the backgrounds..

Also, word to the wise.. just because you choose easy mode, it does NOT guarantee victory by any means... I also took a bit of time tonight and added in health bars for each of the player and enemy entities on the screen.. that way the player has an idea of where they stand. There isnt a whole lot to combat.. but if you think about it, you can really up your chances or winning. 

Lessee... I think thats all I did tonight.. There were a few tweaks here and there, and some code cleanup, but thats about it.. Tomorrow I'm going to go back to work on the Ship to Ship encounters.. and tweak and clean that up a bit.. I never did add in creature or trade fleet options, and I am still not so sure I want to do that right now with time running down the way it is.. There is still so much more I need to get done.. It will be fully playable for DBP, I just dont think it will be 'finished'.. 

Anyways, time to crash.. tomorrows a new day and I need to get out there sometime tomorrow and wash the mustang.. poor girls DIRTY!! Plus its payday... might go code at the coffeeshop for a bit if I get up early enough.. 

Alright, so this is like day 3 of coding on the whole boarding a ship thing.. So I dumped my RISK idea.. obviously.. So now what we're going to be doing, is limiting the amount of entities on the gamescreen to 10.. So the player will have 5 entities, the enemy 5, maybe 6.. dunno yet.. Anyways, I'm taking the crew available on the ship, and dividing them into 'groups'.. this way we dont have 200+ sprites wandering around on such a small screen.. it'd be a nightmare.. that solves a lot of issues for me.. Once the battle is over, I'll do some reconciling, figuring the percantage of damage done to you, figure that into the number of crew lost... and done.. 

Tonight.. I was going to get the enemy AI in.. I didn't touch that at all.. not the teensiest bit.. Instead, I got to back to work on finishing the player.. Ran into an issue for a while, where some of your entities acted like complete morons.. for no apparent reason.. They'd just kind of surrender to the foe, and stand there stupidly while their cohorts functioned properly.. Still not 100% sure why they were doing that, but I squashed it.. 

Next we added in ranged combat.. actually displaying bullets, would have been overkill.. so instead I got my ranges figured, movement in, particles in and got ranged combat.. Heres the kicker.. Your little guys are semi-smart.. if the enemy gets too close for a ranged weapon, they automatically switch over to melee.. However, once in melee mode, they wont automatically go back to ranged.. I like it this way.. it simulates a real battle.. in a real battle, your not gonna draw your sword, kill your dude, then turn around and run away so you can pull a gun out. 

I also tweaked the timing a bit.. Ranged attacks are going to do more damage... bullets hurt dammit!! But of course, is a lot slower than frantically swinging a sword..

All this was good, but without sound, it gets old and tedious pretty quick.. So I got all the sound effects added in and playing.. walking sounds.. firing.. sword hits and missing.. grunts.. last breaths.. And get this, win the battle, and all your little guys start cheering for ya.. 

Now that we had sounds it was better.. but it was still pretty static.. so I jumped ahead of my plan, and added in all the basic animations.. So I have my walking animations in, sword swinging, and well, thats about it, and thats all it really needed.. 

So now that the player entities are fleshed out a bit.. tomorrow at work, I'm going to do a rough outline for the enemy AI, and then maybe start coding it at work.. just depends on how busy work gets.. Never fails when I want to work on something, work gets busy with work.. Murphy's law..

After the enemy AI is done though, thats pretty much it for the hand to hand combat.. much easier than I had originally thought.. then I can go back and tweak a few things on this to make it workable for other parts of the game.. and I think i actually will get like 3 different gameplay elements of the main game with some very minor tweaks.. =D  Dont know if that made sense, but it did to me.. and thats what matters.. 

Anyways, reading a bunch of the old Forgotten Realms books.. right now the Avatar series is calling me.. Must see what midnight is up to next... Later! 

 So, didn't feel like hexes.. It just didnt fit the style.. So tonight, I tackled a task I hadn't done before.. Unit Picking and selecting multiple units.. So the boarding portion is going to be more like an RTS with RISK elements.. but 2D top down, and similiar in "rounds" to the ship to ship combat.. 

Once I had finally gotten a good enough looking top down sprite to go with my lovely drawn background.. friggin sprite took half the night and 50 retries.. grrrr.. Then it cam time to get it on the field.. So we hacked together a player class, an enemy class, and got those drawing.. 

Next up, I've never done any kind of selection box where you can select single or multiple units.. So first, I tore apart the MS Virtual THumbpad class, renamed stuff, ripped out the leftThumb and rightThumb and simplified it.. So I got that into place and perfect.. we can track a touch from its beginning point to its end.. So now we built a rectangle, drew it up.. beautiful..

Modify the player class a bit to add a selected variable.. and a boundingSphere.. and now we can track which players pieces intersect our rectangle and light em up!

You know, I had expected this whole little part to be 100x more complicated than it really was.. I guess I never stopped and just looked at the basics of it and how it works.. Its stupidly simple really.. 

Anyways, here our end result.. Lovely little 38 second video of it working in action..

 And why is the mouse always off in fraps... pointers in the right spot on screen.. the recording, its confused.. Ah well..

Not too shabby.. even if it is now 4am.. crap.. i need to get to sleep or else I'm gonna be watching a sunrise.. and its hard to fall asleep when its friggin light out.. ah well...

Starting experimenting with assets for the critters.. Completely unanimated right now.. and still not sure how I'm going to end up doing these, but just some ideas here...

Still playing around.. I *think* I like these.. just dont know..