Welcome to the warlords remake

[SnotlinG]

I have been working with several diffrent areas lately:

# Added minimap cities to the city popup. Its possible to change your active city by clicking on this minimap. So you can quickly jump between your cities to check the production is setup as you want.

# Added tooltips to the buttons in the city-screens. Also updated the other tooltips ingame to be language independent, you wont notice the difference though

# Changed production and income/upkeep to be calculated at the start of your turn instead of the end of previous players turn. This will make it harder for observers to spot exactly what/when you produce something in your cities.

# Continued work on the vector functionality, its a bit complex, and also challenging to make it easy to use. Its not complete yet though, but can now be used at your own risk I hope to complete it in a few days.

When Im done with this I have some small things in queue, like
- Enable the new extra BUY production button
- Extra security question on the raze option
- Fix the layout of the occupy/plunder/raze screen
- Possibility to rename cities
- Some kind of battleadvisor functionality

[SnotlinG]

Just a small update, Im almost complete with the vectoring functionality.
Right now its only the grafics of a button thats missing, and most likely some few bugfixes
To our beta testers: feel free to use it now

Also, units that have 1 or 0 left in movment when ending their move will be automatically unselected now.

Now I will start with the new BUY button-functionality...

Also have realized there is a small bug with the occupy/plunder screen, if it gets lost (its an ajax request) the player can still end his/her turn. I´ll have to fix a workaround for this one

[SnotlinG]

Now the last update on vectoring is finished.
The minimap is obviously not completed yet, but thats something we will deal with a bit later in the development.

[SnotlinG]

# Fixed a bug that caused flyers to pay 2 per step, when going together with a ship on open water, it should only cost 1.

# Rename city is now possible, but only in your turn, i.e. not during observermode

# Buy-button implemented in the city buy-screen. It will also show more details about the unit before you buy it.

# Updated the city producing screen, showing movespecial abilities as well as fightspecial abilities.

# Added an extra confirm step on the "Raze" option, so you don´t happen to raze your newly conquered cities by misstake

# Changed the "occupy/plunder/raze"-popupscreen to be client-JS-controlled rather than ajax-based. This to make sure it is not lost due to a failed ajax-call.

# Increased number of players you can be at war with at the same time (it should ofcourse not be any limit). Thanks steff for reaching the limit so it showed

# Fixed a bug that under certain circumstances could give you extra armies produced if you let your gameturn expire.

[SnotlinG]

Im finally getting to the minimap area, so you should see some improvments there soon I hope

For now I have fixed that army positions on the minimap is updated directly when you move your units. It seems to work quite nicely

[SnotlinG]

As you might have seen we fixed the first version of the minimap a day ago or something. This first version doesnt include hills or mountains, as Piranha is busy re-designing them. This is something that we plan to add to beta phase 2.

Besides this I have fixed a number of small improvments:

# Fixed bug with update of army positions on the minimap when moving. Also fixed update after combat - removing the loosing army´s entry on the minimap.

# City colors are updated on the minimap directly when conquered/razed now.

# Fixed gold is updated directly in the client when purchasing new production in a city

# When conquering a city from an enemy player, the client gold is now updated directly/correctly

[piranha]

I've spent the last day on remaking graphics for hills and mountains as they required two tiles to repeat. It turned out to be a lot of trouble when making a map when there were so many tiles that looked almost the same.

I will start building the next beta map in a few days now.

Right now I'm working on a support / mail system for the community part of the site.

[piranha]

The last days I spent finishing a mailing system / support system so people who cant post in the forum can still contact us. I will be on holiday until next Monday and when I get back I will test it a bit before I put it online.

Next point for me is to redesign the lobby when hosting games to. Last time many players didn't understand that they need to pick a race and select ready to be in the game. I will also add a advanced tab to set more detailed options.

After that I will do sea battles.

Snotling is working on heroes right now.

I also have to take a look at the forum why some people can't post there.

During the last week I also contacted a professional freelance game artist who will remake all our graphics to look modern and professional. This will be very cool. We are also changing from 48x48 tiles to 64x64 so it will look much better.
I'm also redesigning the interface so it will use the whole screen. If you have a modern laptop with HD resolution (1920*1080) you will see 23x13 tiles (in my current test setup) instead of 12x12 like you do now.
It will scale to fit all resolutions. Right now if you have less height resolution than 900 you need to scroll all the time. With the new design it will scale even for the lowest resolutions.

This will take time to finish so it won't be in Beta2.

[SnotlinG]

It might look like not that much is happening lately, but to increase the effectivity we have branched of the development from the beta test, so we can develop without causing problems for the testers. I.e. the current ongoing beta won´t see much more updates than it currently has. All new changes gets into beta2.

I have been busy setting up hero functionality. So far we have:
# New hero at start of turn 1
# Hero gains xp if winning a fight (and is the attacker) (additional xp for winning cities)
# Hero can gain new levels (checked after each fight, so no need to wait for next turn)
# Hero levels will be splitted, so 1 level could mean +1 in str, next level +2 in move etc... So we will have more levels and heroes will level more often, but each level is not as big step as before.
# New hero offers including allies



While building this I realized we need a window-queue system, as we are re-using the windowforms and just populating them with diffrent data depending on what we want to show, so if we try to draw several windows at once all except the last will be lost. Makes sense, eh? Anyway this has also been implemented.

Also added a few more tutorial popups (to test the window-queue system )

[piranha]

I've created a mail system for the community side of the site.

I had to create a way to contact us (for all those who can't access the forum) so I decided to make a support system combined with a way for members to contact each other. This will become more useful when there are teams and team games.

It works quite similar to outlook.

I've also redesigned the game lobby to make it easier for new players to understand if they are in the game or not.
I added a tab for advanced hosting options that currently are:
Password protect game
FOW (Fog of War) on or of (default is on)
Startunits (random, medium units or good units) (default is random)
Cities can produce allies (defult is off)