I spent a ton of time this week polishing the modding system for Galcon 2. I’m really looking forward to letting everyone dive in and try out the game and give modding a whirl very soon One of the most useful features I added was a console to the game, so that while you are building a mod, you can get error reports back from Lua, as well as manually type in Lua code from a prompt for quick tweaks. The modding system also auto-reloads mods, so if you are editing the file on the side, you can see your updates instantly. (This was really exciting when I was working on the bot AI, the AI was all doing the wrong thing, so I edited the file, saved it, and instantly the bots started doing the new behavior! It’s really fun!)

A big part of the game, and the mods, is the ability to have menus for users to pick options. Doing GUI code is a real pain so I decided to work to avoid all that by creating a very simple HTML parser that would work with my GUI system. This way modders can plunk in some simple HTML code and give the users options to pick ranks, numbers of planets, or whatever. This is also going to really help me with rapid development of the rest of the game. The HTML capability is very minimal, but covers the basics.

I spent about 15 minutes goofing off this week, seeing how the game play would look behind the menus. I think this *could* work really nicely in the future once I’ve got sweet rendered planets and effects and stuff. I’ve taken this out of the game for now, because I found it made reading the menus pretty difficult!

Here’s a brief demo of me playing with the Classic mod. You’ll notice that I’ve got scrolling and zooming built into the game right now. I’m not quite sure if I’m going to keep that as part of the game or not, but it will be in the first beta so you can try it out and tell me what you think. At the very least, having Galcon 2 work properly with all size galaxies is really going to help me with supporting different device sizes.

Thanks!
-Phil

P.S. You can get many of these updates in “realtime” by following me on twitter.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2013 at 12:27 pm and is filed under galcon2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.