All entries for Friday 12 January 2007

More Progress?

Well, where are we? Progress over the Christmas period wasn't as great as I'd hoped for, and certainly I've dropped behind where I would like to be on my timetable.

 List of notable improvements since pre-Christmas:

• Industries can be built and appear on the map
• Buildings now occupy the tile(s) on which they are placed and other buildings cannot also be built there.
• Depots and BusStations are now functionally and visibly different and serve different purposes.
• Depots and BusStations can be built manually by using the GUI.
• Depots and BusStations can be clicked on and the relevant windows appear andcan be interacted with.
• ListBox is complete and can display lists of controls as well as always displaying n items at the top of the Listbox no matter how far up/down it is scrolled.
• Industry, Vehicle and Station information is all now stored in XML files on disk and are parsed at runtime allowing content to be changed without a recompile.
• Other miscellaneous fixes and features not worthy of mentioning.

The next point to reach really is a full implementation of Time and Money. What this means is that as time progresses Industries make cargo, this cargo can then be distributed to the stations that have the industry within their catchment area. The cargo is tagged with it's source location, picked up by vehicles from the station and delivered to another industry that accepts it. Once delivered the company is paid depending on how long it took.  Hopefully this should be too much more work, but I've said that before about other features.

It could be argued perhaps that once industries pickup cargo, transport it, then make money, that there is some strategy involved and TT3D now constitutes a game, "fun" is irrelevant for now as there are still too many niggling issues that detract from the fun-factor of the game.

I'd love to suggest a time when I'll next post an update, but I'd only be lying, so until the next time I find myself stuck in DCS for 4 hours with nothing to do...

: 12 Jan 2007 15:28 |  Tags: Progress |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem