Territory Cards

After the greatest headache since Invasion, there are now Territory Cards in Mega-Risk.  Everything but the troop scaling is in there, mainly because I haven't taken the time to find out what formula Risk uses for that thing.  Everything else works, though.

I'm hoping to get a full playable 'release' (with possibility of actual downloadable release) out in the next couple of weeks.  On the todo list for that to happen is:

• Finish the AI (if we can't get multiplayer working we should at least finish that)
• Make some UI adjustments to make everything look nicer
• Fix that months-old minor Invasion bug where the virtual dice won't roll twice. (?)
• Sea-Lines
• More territories and continents.

So, basically, a bunch of easy stuff and the AI. :D

I'm really looking forward to getting all this base stuff finally done and out of the way so we can finally do what UE4 was made to do and make everything look PRETTYFUL.

Screenies/GIFs probably coming later.

Turns and Disaster Cards(Mega-Risk v.Proto_0.0.3)

Some more stuff happened last month!  After grappling on and off with the problem known as multiplayer, I realized that I don't necessarily need to get that done right away.
This epiphany led me to question the nature of the entire project.  I eventually found myself slightly revamping THE ENTIRE INFRASTRUCTURE (again) after I found out that instances (the thing we had been using to handle UI and a bunch of other stuff) are new, poorly documented, and didn't do what I wanted them to do.  So, I deleted ours and put all the code it contained in other places, which fixed a buttload of problems.

A few minor bugfixes later, and I was ready to implement the myserious things known as TURNS.  As of right now, I've put in the reinforcement and attack stages of Risk as well as the first fully Mega-Risk concept so far: DISASTER CARDS.

For those of you who've never played the original Mega-Risk, disaster cards are in-game events that happen every so often in-between turns.  They grab a random territory and do something to make the owner (an sometimes all adjacent territory's owners) suffer.  They could be anything from a lightning storm that halves the troop count to a deadly doomsday device that reduces everyone's troop count to 1.

I've got those working now.

So, all in all, the project is coming aloong nicely and, should the bug gods be kind, may be in a "playable" state before school starts!

OH, and I suppose this warrents a new 'release'.  It's time for:

Mega-Risk v.Proto_0.0.3
Changelog:
- Removed GameInstance
- Added turn-locked territory selection
- Added reinforcement stage
 - When a territory is selected, its troop count goes up by one.
- Added Disaster Cards/Events(I like that name better)
 - Happen at the end of a round
 - Select a random territory and affect its troop count in some way
- Added Top Bar
 - Displays a variety of info including player's team, total troops, and other stuff
 - Holds constantly-available buttons such as End Turn and In-Game Menu
- Added post-invasion troop movement
 - Widget spawns after victory that lets players move a number of troops from the attacker to attacking territory.

Hmm, looking at that changelog it appears I added some stuff I didn't mention.  Oh well.

I was going to post some GIFs but my screen recorder is giving me some problems.  Once it's fixed I'll update this post.

Multiplayer.

As of right now, multiplayer is the bane of my existance.  It is necessary for moving the project forward, yet it refuses to work.  On the plus side, I am able to host a game and have other clients connect to it (under very specific circumstances).

That's where the working part ends.  Everything that follows joining a game is ENTIRELY BROKEN.  The amount of problems led me to make a Bugs list on the Trello Page.

Fortunately, our magic code man Ethan will be BACK IN BUSINESS after his six-month computer hiatus ends on Wednesday.  Maybe he will have a magical solution to this.

I'M BACK. (Mega-Risk v.Proto_0.0.2)

It's basically summer so I can now at least try to keep this thing updated regularly.  There has been some progress on Mega-Risk since I last made an update over a month ago.  Namely, I implemented teams (pretty much).  All players (or, since there is no multiplayer, the player) are only able to interact with territories of their color-faction.
I've made a GIF showing off theese thigns.  I should do this from now on. BEHOLD, MY GIF-MAKING POWERS:

Now that I've gotten to a point where all of the features work, I think it's time for a new version. Thus, I dub the current stage of Mega-Risk:
Mega-Risk v.Proto_0.0.2
Changelog:
- Revamped GameMode
- Added foliage to map
- Added teams
  - Territories all are assigned to a team, which determines their color.
  - Players are also all on teams.
  - Players can onl interace with territories that belong to them, unless they're         invading, in which case they can also interact with territories adjacent to the       attacking territory.
- Added Main Menu
  - "Play SP" button enters main map
  - "Settings" button enters currently functionless settings menu
  - "Quit" button closes game
-Updated to Unreal 4.8



Next up: pseudo-turns (I say pseudo because they won't be real turns until multiplayer works).

Invasion (mostly) works!

Yes, you read that right.  I've finally gotten Invasion, the cornerstone mechanic of any Risk game, to a somewhat working state.  I say somewhat because, basically, I can't get the game to compare more than one set of dice per roll.

To put this into perspective, say the game rolls [6, 4, 2] for the attacker and [6, 1] for the defender.  Because of the bug, the game will compare the two highest rolls (the 6s) but afterwards it won't move on to compare the second highest numbers (the 4 and the 1).  It will instead compare the two highest numbers twice.  This causes nearly all invasions to bring both the defender and attacker's troop counts down into the single digits most every time.

I'd probably have been able to fix this over the past couple days, but I've been trying and failing to reinstall Windows onto my new SSD and I'm the sort of person who is unable to focus on anything once he comes across a difficult problem.

Hopefully I can get this thing to work soon so I can go back to Mega-Risk dev.

Multiplayer Thigns

Well, I tried to make it a weekly thing.  And I failed.  And I'm sorry.

Not much has happened over past few weeks.  After I found that the storage site we were using would only let us store 1GB of stuff on it I told Conrad that I would look for an alternative.  I am now using the recommended Perforce client and running a server myself, but Conrad and I are getting the same timeout problem we were with Subversion.  So there's that. :/

On the actual dev side of things, I've been figuring out how to make multiplayer work because, for the most part, all of the remaining basic features will requre some sort of multiplayer functionality to work (turns, disaster cards[which happen in between turns], and some UI stuff).  However, I found that our entire character setup is basically wrong.  So I had to remake everything.  Then I came across problem.  As of today, I have posted my problem on UE4's AnswerHub and am waiting a reply.

So that is the state of the game.  Hopefully the next time I make an update I'll have everything in a more working state.

A POST.

Spring break is nearly over and this is the first post during that time. :/

Although not as much got done as I had hoped, some very important stuff happened:

1. Unreal went free, allowing Conrad to go full-on dev.
2. We (kind of) got a form of source control was set up, and although there is a problem with it now, it will allow us to practically work on the same project all at once.
3. I got invasion practically done.  All that is left is to fix a bug or two.

Conrad has been great adding in details that I've been too busy with the main stuff to do.  He's added in better camera controls, foliage, a main menu, and some music (although that was mainly lost in the great source control calamity).

I, meanwhile, have been figuring out invasion code and trying to get source control working.  Speaking of which, I should explain why Mega-Risk didn't get a Minecraft-sized update these past couple of weeks.  It happened in an event I like to call:

THE GREAT SOURCE CONTROL CALAMITY

About a week after the last blog post, Conrad and I had finally got source control working via an online repository hosting site.  I had my project hooked up to it and all of my files were in there.  Conrad had hooked his project up as well.

Conrad had more changes, but the changes I had made were more complex, so instead of either of us merging the source control files with our (and thus wiping out all of our progress), we decided that Conrad would copy everything I had done into his project and then upload his files, which I would download.  I don't remember why, but Conrad ended up with a broken territory class.  We tried fixing the problem in a variety of ways, but they all made everything worse until Conrad's project was completely broken and he had lost a lot of his work, including the music setup.

Fortunately, Conrad had uploaded some of his entirely new files to source control and I had added them to my project.  Also, he had taked screenshots of some of his stuff and has been able to rework some of it from those.  Nevertheless, it took us at least five days to get to a point similar to before the calamity.

But despite that, I'm proud to say that I should have invasion fully functional by the end of spring break on Tuesday and I can announce the next version.

I might have made more posts since two weeks ago, but at the end of any one day it never felt like we got any concrete set of stuff added in and I didn't want to say something like "we mostly got this and that done, but it's not done yet".  

I realize I'm doing this here with invasion, but a number of things led to this today, including us having an actual meeting where we discussed things (:O), Conrad and I finally getting our projects synced and ready to source control again (once I fix an issue with logging in to the server), and Hank DLing Unreal (woo!).

I HOPE TO BE BACK SOON.