Fleshed out the Unit Cre­ation / Cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem. It now prop­erly shows / hides meshes as well as swap­ping tex­tures and also added some view options — you can rotate the object and also zoom in / out as desired to get a bet­ter view of the mod­i­fi­ca­tions that you are making.

(con­tinue reading…)

Now that I have the high-level struc­ture for the game imple­mented, it is very easy for me to add the addi­tional ‘modes’ and screens that the player will go through in the game. Case in point — Weapon Cus­tomiza­tion. Tech­ni­cally it’s not appear­ing where I want it to yet, but the nice part is that I can just add it as a mis­sion in the cam­paign, wher­ever I want it to appear, and the game will auto­mat­i­cally load & exe­cute the mis­sion — almost as a self-contained mod­ule of sorts. This lets me bun­dle together pieces of func­tion­al­ity (for exam­ple, the cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem) and then re-use them as nec­es­sary by essen­tially trig­ger­ing them as mini-missions that the player has to com­plete in order to continue.

Mis­sion in this con­text is more a self-contained mod­ule that gets exe­cuted — mis­sions can load cus­tom worlds (or not), exe­cute cus­tom scripts ( like the cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem) or not, launch cin­e­mat­ics (or not) and all kinds of fun stuff. In this man­ner, every­thing from the Base man­age­ment sys­tem, to the char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion, to the indi­vid­ual ‘real game­play’ seg­ments (ie the deploy­ment of sol­diers into the field) can all be man­aged the exact same way with­out need­ing a billino spe­cial case flags and sce­nar­ios that need to be taken into account.

Not only that but it also imple­ments the full User Pro­file sys­tem that GameCore sup­ports as well as SaveG­ames, so as I flesh this out fur­ther, all I need to do is set a few vari­ables, call ‘save game’ and the results of that par­tic­u­lar mod­ule (whether it’s a weapon cus­tomiza­tion screen, base man­age­ment or actual ‘Mis­sion Pro­file’ against the badguys) are acces­si­ble from the rest of the game.

Mod­u­lar design == good.