[Boson-devel] Status

[Andreas B. <b_...@gm...>]

Hi

By any reason I cannot get boson 0.5 running on my system anymore. I don't 
know why - it was working when I downloaded this after the release (after 
sime startup problems and so). Currently I get a black screen and the units 
on it... The map editor is just crashing.

That's why I cannot compare the current version to the original one. So here 
is just rough overview.

First of all boson has been ported to QT3/KDE3 and the KGame library in 
libkdegames. This was done cause (a) I wanted a real time test game and (b) 
IMHO the old code was too complex to me.
This means as I wrote before a complete rewrite. Most stuff is now working 
again. You can move units (note: boson is no more fully tile based. If you 
move a unit you move by pixels, not by cells), you can shoot and destroy 
other units. You can build units and place them.

A newly built unit can be placed only within a specific range of the building 
that built it. At leas for facilities that is a bad thing, as you have to 
have a command bunker very close to where you want to place a building... 
Needs to be fixed.
Unit building now has a "delay", it needs some time until a unit is produced. 
I still need to add some visual feedback for this, probably need to rewrite 
my own BosonCommandFrame class which is a very ugly class (sorry - my fault).

Tooltips are working.

The entire game is now i18n'ed, so if you want to translate... :-)

For the last few days I have been working on the fog of war. The good news is: 
it is now working. The bad news is that it breaks the display of units on the 
minimap... It also seems to have a performance problem. This is not yet 
important but will probably cause problems if a lot of units are moving.

Thanks to KGame we are also supporting computer players now. I haven't tested 
network players with fog of war - perhaps they are currently broken but 
that'd be easy to fix. We do *not* yet have any AI. If there are any 
volunteers please join!

The map editor is working as well. I am not using it very much so I don't know 
how useful it already is and if there are many bugs. But it should be usable. 
The createGround tool is now obsolete - the map editor has a menu item for 
this. Just tell it where the earth/ directory is and it creates the earth.png 
(or whatever you call it) for you.

Thanks to KSimpleConfig we also have a unit editor now. It's also a menu item 
in the map editor. It doesn't support all the possible options or a unit (I 
have changed/added many recently and not yet adjusted the editor) but the 
basic stuff is there.