PezzA

*Cough* belated happy new year! Hope you all had a good one, personally, i was in bed by 10! And thanks all for kind and wise words! Family is doing well. (if a bit tired) Seeing as we are getting back into some semblance of a routine , I'll be getting my head back into the game. p.s. Kafros, that link is hilarious!

WPF Progress continues to be slow, there's quite a few tentacles in the work, but mainly it's slow because me and the wife just had a baby! Catch you in the new year, Happy xmas all!

I like the reindeer! There's an easter egg in there!

Nice! I'd love to see CTD's Santa autopsy text!

Or at least until they are in visual range. You could see the ship at that point in the old game, we'd just be 'remembering' it. It can be a (very nicely done) question mark until that point.

What's TED?

Thought i'd check in where i am with this. Still building the stub application i'm afraid, getting a few problems with game state when running outside the boundary of an XNA game object. And not really into the meat of the getting the 3D scenes up into a WPF app. What i've been doing is moving all the model logic into a separate XenocideModel assembly which can then be used by any other app. When that's there and i have an interface where a game can be loaded and saved, is to move the geoscape as a scene (possibly from a scene engine assembly) into the form. It's a bit hard going though, and there is the nagging doubt current XNA/WPF integration techniques are just clever workarounds at the moment, and might not be robust enough a platform for development. In the meantime you might want to look at this. Neoforce controls are under development at the moment and have a decent set of widgets. No multi-column list box however. (or tree-view). I've not tried adding these controls to xenocide yet. I might if i get totally stumped with the WPF app.

I think that would work. Some questions/comments:1. At what point does the text appear and disappear? When you mouse over the UFO, when you click on it, or some other time? 2. I don't think you can have it just appear automatically, becaue you can have multiple UFOs on the screen. 3. When you have the Tachyon detector, you get a lot more information about the UFO. Is there enough room on the menu for it? If not, is scrolling going to work? Sorry, not trying to be difficult. I had done something similar with an earlier version of the Geo-hud. The return value from geoHud.End() was a descriptive text of the object that was currently hovered over, this was then set as the text for this info area under the time controls. I'm not sure if this was the best way of doing it, but it's definitely possible. It's 5-9 lines of text for an alien, what we might need is someway to reduce this. (although I don't think we have any way of determining altitude and heading at the moment so maybe it's only 3-7). (attached as an aide-memoir) http://www.ufopaedia.org/images/5/5b/Hyperwave_Detection.png Imagine the above dialog window in the info area, and then think, is thier a better way of presenting this information that will also take up a fixed amount of space? My suggestions: Background image is an image of the ufo. class, mission and ufo type can be represented by icons with tool-tips in a similar manner to world of warcraft class, faction and race icons. That's a ton of art needed thou.

The only thing i can think off is that the random location has moved them into water and then getclosetland has move them out of detection range. Turn on the detect all ufo cheat and see where it's ending up. If the ufo is flying past your base at max speed, it's probably wont be detected. Where are you placing your first base? Also, start a new game to try to get variation on this. The initial target is determined as soon as the first base is placed, so if you save than load the game, it will always be going to the same place. With the aliens always being landed, the chances are that before, they were in the air but stationary. This is now regarded as being landed. I think changing the name of the ufo or prefixing the hover-over with landing site is a good idea. Would we want an alert on screen to notify of the landing/takeoff if the ufo is known, or would that give us pop-up spam? In a similar manner to the first missions being targeted near the players base, is it worthwhile guaranteeing detection for the first few aliens that fly overhead?

OK, I've had a VERY quick glance the code, and my first impression (which may be wrong) is that it's going to take a fair bit of work to get this going, as we'd need to create a grid control, a tree control (for the UFOpedia) and a large area text control. My preference is to go for WPF, for the following reasons. 1. WindowsSystem doesn't seem to have had any progress since 2007. And I don't think many people are using it. 2. WPF has been out there for a while, is stable, relatively bug free, and has a resonable number of people familiar with it. (And tutorials/help/tools for using it.) 3. WPF is specifially designed to seperate the UI's appearance from functionality. Which means (at least in theory) once the code behind the UI works, a graphics designer can "easily" alter the UI appearance to their heart's content, without needing a programmer's assistance. (I have bad memories of spending weeks tweaking the appearance of the C++ UFOpedia under the direction of our graphic artist/designer. I did not enjoy the experience. No insult to him, it was just lots of tiny, tiny changes.) 4. The time spent learning WPF is a potentially useful/marketable skill. 5. Because it's standard, we may have more luck getting a Graphic Artist/Designer willing to help work on it. Of course, it does have a couple of downsides. 1. It locks us pretty firmly into the Windows platform. (Although Moonlight may solve that.) 2. It may lock us out of the 360, again, until silverlight runs on it. (Not sure if it ever will.) 3. WPF has a steep learning curve. (Although there are lots of tutorials on it.) 4. We haven't confirmed we actually can get Xenocide up and running under WPF. So, my thoughts. Darkhomb, do you want to try mocking up some Xenocide screens in WPF, to see what it's like? (I suggest the UFOpedia, and maybe the base inventory screen.) PezzA, do you want to see if you can get xenocide running under WPF? That said, you may want to give Darkhomb a hand to build a stub executible for him to work with. By creating a shell WPF program, and then adding the "Model" part of xenocide to it, so that he's got actual data to work with for the UI. Sure, I'll get weaving. I'll have some background reading to do first. I was going to make the suggestion over in the other colonization thread, but might as well suggest it here. Regarding colonization, maybe another approach is for you to go 'on secondment' with the colonisation team, who sound like they have quite a lot of devs with 3d/game smarts, and work on a battlescape engine that both projects can use? This will be the lynch-pin of both games so maybe that's where we'll get most bang for our buck in terms of collaboration. It'd also let you focus on that task. Just an idea.

Just a quick patch that introduces a new cheat 'allowAutoWinBattlescape'. If set to true (which it is by default in this patch) it gives you a new button on the start battle scape dialogue giving you the option to auto-win. This will let you pick up points and salvage from the mission, and a coach load of alive and surprised aliens all ready for water-boarding. I figured this would be useful for Geoscape testing prior to the battlescape being finished. autowin2.zip edit: forgot a file in the patch. Autowin2 is good.

I keep on forgetting that this board is bigger than just Xenocide.

I can pick that up as my next job, however just as the kitchen is the first thing to go when you move into a new house, is the same true of UI systems in xna-fan-project mergers? Not sure there is any point progressing any UI elements until we know where it's all going. Well, as part of the merger, I was considering if there's a better C# based UI framework. And I came across an article on using XNA inside WPF. Now, at work we're moving to WPF, all new GUIs are made using it. So, long story sort, if the merger happens, I'd push really hard to replace Cegui# with WPF. Failing that, well, I'd still like to do it, but at the moment, my priority is the battlescape. I'd be right with you on WPF if you wanted to go that way, work is also picking this up, so i'd be getting quite a bit of bang for my buck in terms of time spent on the project.

Seems to have worked!

I was hoping I'd be able to merge this into the trunk this weekend. Unfortunately, my father is in the hospital, and it's doubtful I'm going to have the time. I wouldn't worry about this, or any other PX item, in the slightest. Personal stuff comes first. Best wishes.