Now playing

Now playing:

Penguin Cafe Orchestra/, Fight Club (Soundtrack)/, Tron 2.0 Theme, (Odd that I find this helps me focus), Schoene Blaue Danube, Vindaloo, Fatboy Slim – Praise You, Blur – Song 2, Shakira/Britney/Beegees QMix

Code in progress:

  // Check the population of hulks in the zone around this 
  // hulk's grid, tracking which cell has the highest count so that 
  // we can pull an older hulk if population limits are reached.  
  GridKey key(gx, gy) ;  
  ChatGrid& cell = _chatGrid[key] ;      

  if ( _countHulks(cell) > wwii_config.stosHulkLimitPerCell )  
    _popHulk(cell) ;     

  // Setting shlpa to zero disables this functionality  
  if ( wwii_config.stoHulkLimitPerArea <= 0 )  
    return ;     

  // Start with the assumption ours will be highest populated  
  ChatGrid& highestPopulatedCell = cell ;      

  // Iterators/counters for the loop  
  NEIGHBORS::iterator nIt ;  
  STOS::iterator sIt ;  
  UINT32 hulksInArea ;      

  for ( nIt = cell.neighborhood().begin()  
      ; nIt != cell.neighborhood().end()  
      ; ++nIt )  
  {  
    ///TODO: Track the highest populated neighbor, count  
  }     

  // Are we worried about population counts?  
  // NOTE: shlpa values can go down as well as up, so  
  // don't assume we'll never be more than 1 over  
  // (hence while instead of if)  
  while ( hulksInArea > wwii_config.stoHulkLimitPerArea )  
  {  
    _popHulk(highestPopulatedCell) ;  
    --hulksInArea ;  
  }

Incredible hulks

There’s nothing incredible about them, actually. Incredibly sucky, maybe?

I’m slowly learning why when I got here, all the coders were “Can’t do!“ers. Apparently last week I agreed to do hulks. Actually, I thought what I said was more on the lines of “sure we could do them but they need a lot of work and design or they’ll either be crap or use a lot of bandwidth, and I don’t think we want to use more bandwidth just now do we”?

Ramp’s been working on various UI things this week, there’s some real goodness potential there. Missions and brigades you have squad members on will have a squad icon next to them, you can switch to a squaddies brigade/mission with a click (agh, I better make sure he’s taken country into account there).

I was also trying to talk him into some other concepts like (common) mission shortcuts (e.g. right click on a town next to your brigade and get a context menu offering probable mission types), and the holy grail of right clicking on a town to select a brigade. Today, I believe, he was working on adding the AAR scoring details that I’ve been sending since 1.20 on the AAR screen – so you’ll now whether you bombed things, killed AI, etc, etc.

Gophur was also tossing around an idea to let you use “/join player” to switch brigade/mission to where a particular player is. Given the reaction to “/who” I think that’d cause hissy fits, so I suggested we limit it to a mission leader — i.e. if you type “/join gophur” and he’s running a mission, it’ll switch to the neccesary brigade and select that mission for ya.

I’m going to finalize what I was doing with hulks tomorrow, hopefully round off the /takelead and related mission changes, take a last look at the practicality of some changes to the multicrew system I was making (maybe late at this stage), and see if I can find somewhere to squeeze the 48 bits into an already crammed data structure so you can see squad tags under icons (if you turn the option on).