I've tried the demo of Civ Revolutions. There are some things I don't like, but they should be fixed in the final version (I hope).

 The fascinating thing about it for me is that it's a playable strategy game for the XBox 360. The controls need some work, and I'd hate to try playing a huge civilization, but it seems to be playable. That answers one queston I've been playing with, whether a game like Operational Warfare would even be possible on a console. The answer is a qualified Yes. It's probably unplayable for the monsters, but for the smaller scenarios, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Later versions of XNA are likely to be able to do WPF as well, so I'll take anoter look in a year or so.

   Once the final version of Vic Rev comes out, I'll have to watch their forums and try it.

TOAW seems to compile and run fine now as Managed C++.

Why do you care? Because next version is getting a major facelift. I was thinking that I'd have to go off into the woods for a year or so in order to do that, but it looks like I may be able to do someof it in pieces instead of all at once. That means that I can combine internal changes and user interface changes and some testing and new coding all at the same time, instead of having to convert everything first before doing anything else. It makes my life a little easier, and may help to keep some of the Beta Bunnies. Definitely not something for TOAW III, I'm afraid. Doing something like that could be a support nightmare as all of the Mac/Linux/Windows 98 users came out of the woodwork after me.

Ralph

If you do anything with presenting data to users, this is something that you should watch. There are a lot of neat ideas in here that I want to apply to TOAW or the next game. It's definitely got some really good ideas. I'm going to pick up the book too, although i don't know when I'll have the time to read it. It talks about things like using the font size and contrast to help direct peoples attention to the important pieces, keeping the attention focused on one spot (like tooltips) and several other details like that which most people don't consciously think about. Some of the things I can implement now, and some (most of the contrast ones) will have to wait until the next game.

 One example would be looking at the pop up menu to see if it makes sense to center it on the place that I might expect a user to click by the context. I don't know if it's possible, but it's something to look at.

http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=112

WPF is the latest and greated UI Design tool from MS. It's a work in progress right now, it's pretty complete, but the design tools aren't there. It's also the basis of what the new Major League Baseball site, and the Olympics site are built with. It's also what MS is moving all of it's sites to. It can do some very impressive graphics, even things like showing little movies when you click on th units, etc.

That's not why I want to use it, though. I want to use it because it may be the easiest way to bring the graphics into the 21st century.

There are some serious advantages like support for floating dockable windows, OOB Trees, and a bunch of other stuff like that. A web version is even possible, although with the size of the graphics, it probably isn't practical. I talked with someone that is seriously into WPF, and he thinks that it's possible to write a game like TOAW into WPF. I wanted to check, since the map is a lot of polygons to throw on the screen at once. While the hexes would still be 2D, the counters would be vector graphics, which means that they can be made smaller or larger without becoming blurry. The 3D view could even have real 3D figures on it<g>.

Since it looks like it's possible, I'll need to throw together a prototype and see what it does. It's something else for me to shoot for.

Ralph

OK, I think I've got them about where I want them. You can contorl how long they're up, and a bunch of other things like the font. I know it's definitely too obtrusive for some people. The default (for now) is that they are about 20% visible, The bitmap always shows up on the side of the bitmap away form the cursor, They show up for about 2 seconds then disappear. I've got a large font for testing.

I've added the AT, Infantry and AP modifiers. I didn't bother with the Vehicle, Static and Attack (River) modifieres. I don't think that there's a lot of need for them.

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