Zania week 7: GUI

Completed

That break took a spin for the worst. Ah well, a well needed break to work on another project (Working as a break from work? REALLY?). Back to grinding the code, it is almost good enough for the next indie game developer presentation to gauge player interest. After which I will determine whether or not to continue and what needs to be changed as features. I still haven’t spent any time polishing the graphics, but at least the GUI is not as cluttered as before. Debug mode is enabled, so you can see the graphics overlayed on top of the compounded physics bodies. Simple triangles and rectangles for now, I don’t have the time to properly define them.

Radar
- No idea how to make a radar.
- Taking advantage of solarSystem update to update radar at the same time.
- Wow, there’s a lot of considerations to make for radar
- Decided to clear the radar every 0x00ff second and re add every item to the radar
- Added a list to keep track of all the radar spot graphics for easy removal
- Adding algorithm to calculate scaling
- Radar done
Menu button created
- buttons disabled when invisible
- Mouse over effect
- Toggle menu visibility
Conversion to CS5 completed
GUI null object reference encountered.
- Suspect OverlayHud m_health_width = m_player.m_player.health; Probably because player.health hasn’t been loaded before access.
- Nailed it. Changed it in Zania.as though. updating m_hud in if(m_player.m_body){//Update only after player body is created
- Health is on ship, doing a m_player.m_body check will return null if the ship hasn’t completed loading
- When overlay is created it references Zania.m_player, however m_player has not been created hence null.
- m_player creation requiers m_hud to be present. Circular deadlock.
- Solved by having player Set the overlayhud to the overlay object after initiation

Incomplete

GUI health bar not decreasing correctly fully, also, health count drops to negative before counting is terminated
Improve physics engine
Determine which class should be the one retaining weapon ID
- Actor? Ship? Player? AI?

Steps to first milestone August 1st

One player ship and one ai ship artwork finished along with their xml data (Art + some programming)
~~Hitpoints, body existence timer and actor destruction (Hardcore Programming)~~
One planet orbiting the sun. (Hardcore Programming)
GUI placement (Art + menial Programming): ~~Health bar~~, ammo count, ~~radar~~, inventory
Booster animation (Art + Math + some programming)
Populated galaxy (menial programming)
Dynamic graphics loader for background? (Cleverness)