Editor, Mission Editor, Tech Demo

I've been working on the grid system. The editor didn't use the grid before, but it does now. Also, the editor can save to a specified path, and load as well. I've also consolidated alot of my drawing code into a single static class rather than rewriting it for every state. That way, both my editor and in-game can draw all the world graphics with a single method call. Also, I'll be able to use this in any future states that need the same drawing code.

I've made a decision: there'll be two editors. The first one is the map editor. The second is the mission editor. There'll be two kinds of missions: single-player and multiplayer. Multiplayer missions aren't exactly missions; they'll contain player placement data and not much more. Single-player missions, however, will contain events, AI enemies, and all other required data besides the physical map.

This way I can reuse maps. A single-player map can easily be used as a multiplayer map and vice-versa. Plus, we can revisit old locales in the single-player campaign with ease. To top it off, you'll be able to adjust the tint in the mission editor, so while the map will be bright and sunny in one level, it might be dark and eerie the next time you visit it. All it takes is adjusting a few sliders.

I also worked on my camera class. I decided that I'll never add split-screen support. It's too much work and not very reasonable. It just won't fit in the gameplay because it will defeat the purpose of fog-of-war. Thus, I made the camera class static so there can only be one and it is easily accessible.

I've been reading up on sprite batches and how to get the best performance. There's still some work to do, especially on my GUI library, but I've made some headway on the optimization.

The next logical step is to start on the mission editor, but before I do that, I might just polish up what I've got and get that tech demo out. The mission editor's going to be tough. From the mission editor comes events, and from events come scripts. I'm brainstorming how I'll do the scripts. Lua maybe?

Thanks for reading. Questions? Suggestions?

clevceo