berto
Posts: 1351
Joined: 3/13/2002
From: metro Chicago, Illinois, USA
Status: online
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Coder Diary #1 - Windowed the game engine!
Do your eyes deceive you?
The game engine now runs as a full-fledged, resizable, movable windowed application.
Before now, the game engine has always been a fixed, immobile, full-screen application. Running the game that way is still an option, but now one has the choice.
So what? So now you can multi-task easier: switch between the game and the game docs, say, or a web browser, or any other program(s) you might quickly want to run (without having to Alt-Tab, which can be iffy).
The "game engine" (now and hereafter my designation for the actual game .exe, for example: ef.exe, wf.exe, rs.exe, ...) thus joins its brethren -- the organization (OOB) editor, the map editor, the scenario editor -- as a standard windowed application.
Not any easy thing to achieve, not easy figuring out how to do it, which is why it's not been offered before.
Lots has happened since I received the Campaign Series codebase just two months ago. (Has it really been only two months ago? Seems much longer.)
In the first two weeks, after
first receiving the CS source code
making hundreds of edits/fixes to that source code
learning how to operate a new (to me) Integrated Development Environment (the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE)
importing the source code into the IDE, and organizing projects
struggling through dozens of attempted builds, all the way: editing/tweaking code, puzzling through many dozens of obscure compiler error messages, researching fixes in book & on-line references, downloading and applying hotfix updates to the IDE, ...
and once even
borking my Windows installation by way of a malicious Microsoft SDK install (thank God for Windows System Restore!)
since then I have
successfully built (compiled, linked, etc.) the main program .exe's: edorg, edmap, edit (scenario editor), game engine, and what I call "frontend" (the scenario selector/game launcher program)
removed legacy cruft (took out the "garbage"), reducing the code folders/files counts from 274/3209 down to a current much more manageable 73/802 (yes, there really are/were those huge numbers of folders and files!)
moved far along familiarizing myself with and learning the vast amount of code
finalized my hardware/software development environment
set up separate Windows XP & Windows 7 test systems, and soon to be also a Windows 8 test bed
and
fixed the first legacy bug 
But wait! There's more ...
... which I'll save for the next Coder Diary. 
As we go along, please keep in mind:
Rome Wasn't Built in a Day.
We are a team, and I am just one member of that team. The other team members have been, and continue to be, hard at work developing OOBs, scenarios, campaigns, graphics, rule extensions, etc. They deserve all credit, praise, and thanks for taking the game so far, before this Johnny-come-lately (I) joined their hallowed ranks. Onward!
Until the next time ...
_____________________________
Early MusiChicago, http://earlymusichicago.org
PIKT, http://pikt.org
Campaign Series Lead Programmer, http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tt.asp?forumid=226
AGElint debugging toolkit, http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=2978333
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