Making progress again. I've sent a simple version of the new supply model off to the BetaTeam. I've decided that for some reason the transparent tool-tip won't work, but if I make it opaque, it works fine. I don't understand that one, so I'm going to ignore it
. Fixing it would be a major rewrite, and there isn't enough gain to warrant that.
The current verison has the semi-final version of the supply rules. They've been simplified to make them easier to test. It's also got the new and old turn orders. It's also got saving a scenario to XML and loading it. All of these are works in progress, but they should be in good shape.
I'm wokring on removing the menus and the strings from the DLLs and into XML files, I'm almost done with that part too. After that, I need to cherry pick the remaining items while looking at the feedback, and we've got to lock down the feature set for this patch.
It will also give me a little time to look at the following. It's a hex based minesweeper version of a game written in Silverlight. The author has also published the source code for me to tear apart.
http://silverlight.net/community/gallerydetail.aspx?cat=6&sort=1
Why do you care? This means that I cna prototype the next version quicker. Recently, Microsoft has introduced too many new technologies. Two of these are Silverlight and WPF. Silverlight is a light version of WPF. Silverlight runs in a browser, and WPF runs on a desktop. WPF also has some 3D operations that Silverlight doesn't support.
Right now, I'll probalby use WPF for the next version. It's got several advantages, the biggest of these for me are that it makes the interface 100% customizable, I can add in sidebars that fade in and out, dialog boxes/trees that can be easily written, etc. That means that I'll be able to do the first verion of the interface, and let someone else with better graphics skills make it better. If I design it right, someone could even make a 'radar' like graphics display similar to to what's there, but they could add options to turn off terrain, etc. It also opens the door for a 'light' version available in a web browser. There are a bunch of other advantages, but the biggest is that it's going to be a lot faster than the other otpions.
Ralph