The barrage continues: version 0.6

The barrage continues: version 0.6

Magnetic transports is now good enough for me to start building some real versions that function fairly well. The new version (0.6) doesn't bring a lot of changes to the game, rather it extends and improves the user interface.

Some of the changes:

• The game window can now be resized during play.
• A button tray has been introduced to the game's viewport. The button tray contains buttons that enable the user to place magnets.
• A config file has been introduced, it currently holds basic information like preferred game field size, but I have more planned for it.
• A game menu has been added.
• The source is now too large to be handled as one package, it has been split into five packages instead.
• The color code of the map grid power overlay has been changed.
• A lot of various bug fixes, most associated with the map grids and the view of the game field.

One other thing that I wanted to have done for this release was compiled binaries, sadly the complications which distributing code that relies on native binding brings will delay it. JOGL requires native libraries containing the OpenGL bindings to run, that is not much of a problem though since Ant is more than happy to give me three native distributions instead of one. However I have not been able to successfully load the distributed native bindings yet. I'm sure it is quite easy and that I will have it solved as soon as I get some time to take a look at it, but not for this release I'm afraid.

The class diagram has been changed to reflect the division into packages. It is quite large now.

Time for some various screenshots.

This is the new menu. It is very simple at the moment, but it works. I plan on adding some graphics to it in the future, I might also add some more options.

The new button tray is in the top left of the game field. I decided to use the canvas to draw the buttons (rather than making separate buttons) as it fitted nicely into the existing code.

An image of the color changes to the map grids can be found in the project's image section.

The game is starting to take shape now, although there's still a whole lot of work to do. I'm at the point where I feel that I wont bring much new into the project, rather the future work will focus on improving the current contents. I do however have one new thing that I will have to include at some point: the event animation. I'm probably going to ignore it for a while though as it requires making a lot of new graphics, which I don't enjoy.