20 July 1998
- Fixed a bug with the food/labor algorithm.
- The Diety option, "Build Roads", now is biased towards building roads
on an invisible grid of hexes.
- The Diety option, "Build Roads", now builds both bridges and roads.
- On the World Map, water was previously displayed on top of bridges.
Now, bridges will be on top of water.
- Improved the food/labor algorithm to be more "fair" -- it was giving
more food and labor to farms and houses on the southwest side of a
farm. (Many of my algorithmsscan from southwest to northeast, so
there are occasionally artifacts like this that result.) The
algorithm now goes through the farms and houses around the market in a
random order.
- Added a context (right-button) menu to the world map; it does not do
anything yet.
- Fixed a memory corruption bug that occurred whenever (on the world
map) the view rectangle was dragged off the right side of the map.
Programmers: never underestimate the power of overloading operator [].
- Completely redid the tree bitmaps. The trees are now displayed in an
overhead view, and they change with the season and the age of the
trees. Unfortunately the bitmaps are taking up over 150k, so I may
not keep both the age and the seasonal variation.
15 July 1998
- Changed the houses from having populations 16, 32, 48, etc., to 15,
25, 35, etc. There is no reason for me to impose computer-based
numbering (base 2) on users.
10 July 1998
- Removed Auto-Build from the menus.
- Fixed some bugs with map creation.
- Improved the information reporting when using the "select" tool. The
new format is "[Terrain Type] field:value field:value ..." where a
field is something like "elevation" or "water".
- Implemented the new food/labor algorithm. All workers and farmers
meet at markets, so without a market nearby, nothing will happen (as
far as economics goes). The algorithm needs to be tuned a lot, so at
the moment many of the numbers won't make sense.
9 July 1998
- Created new house bitmaps. Instead of spheres, houses are now
polygonal and are shaded using 3D lighting models. Being only five
pixels across, this probably doesn't help.
- The farm bitmaps now vary with the season.
- An asterisk marks the center of your city. The city center is used
by some of the economics calculations.
8 July 1998
- Continued to work on a new food/labor algorithm, which uses markets.
- Wrote a "tabbed window" control for the money, population, and speed
controls; now I'm using that instead of buttons. The tab and the pane
"light up" when the mouse moves over the tab button.
5 July 1998
- Adjusted the water flow algorithm to make lakes more stable. When
lakes form, they are likely to keep their shape for some time.
Previously, lakes would shift unpredictably until they dried up.
- Changed the highlight on the world map from a dark transparent
rectangle (which made it harder to see the contents) to a red
"marching ants" rectangle. If this is too distracting I may change it
to a solid non-animated rectangle.
2 July 1998
- Began to work on a new food/labor algorithm, which will take markets
into account.
27 June 1998
- Realized that the food/labor (network-flow) algorithms aren't working
well in the new building system, because it only works when farms and
houses are next to roads, and it doesn't take markets into account.
26 June 1998
- Finished implementing the new building system.
25 June 1998
- Began to implement a new building system that includes houses, farms,
and markets. Markets tend to be built near city centers; houses tend
to be built where there is easy access to markets; farms tend to be
built away from cities.
- Removed Auto-Build mode, since it was incompatible with the new
building system.
24 June 1998
- Removed 'groundwater' from the simulation. It just wasn't working
very well. Also removed the constant rain.
- Changed the water scale (number of water units per altitude unit)
significantly.
- Changed the water flow algorithm to make more water flow than
previously. The hard part about discrete water flow is that real
water flow is continuous: the old water is moving out of a space at
the same time that new water is moving in. The game's water flow is
discrete: water moves in either before or after water moves out. I'm
hoping the new formula will make water flow behave more like
continuous flow.
23 June 1998
- (Internal) Cleaned up a lot of code to reflect changes in the C++ Standard.
20 June 1998
- Realized that the style of the list of changes has shifted from "X
was done" to "Did X". Oops.
17 June 1998
- Added experimental rain that falls on western slopes of mountains.
The hope is that the rain will fill the water tables and produce
rivers of some sort.
16 June 1998
- Fixed a bug that caused erosion inside trenches.
- Added 'groundwater' to the simulation. Some of the water that goes
on the map will be stored in the ground rather than on the surface.
This water can later reappear at the surface.
18 May 1998
- Fixed a bug that could lead to incorrect initialization of menu items
that act like checkboxes or radio buttons.
- Made the path-finding routines thread-safe.
17 May 1998
- The number of blobs that will come out to build things depends on
your population. At first, only one builder blob will be created. At
every 100,000 in population, you will be able to have one additional
builder blob.
16 May 1998
- The Debug menu lets you view the internal results of the Build Roads
feature. White areas are those that ranked higher for roads.
15 May 1998
- The new Diety option "Build Roads" will erase existing roads, then
scan the map for twenty seconds or so, then build new roads where it
thinks highways should be. This is an experimental feature that may
be used in The Silver Kingdoms.
10 May 1998
- The popup menu currently starts the train going across the map.
9 May 1998
- Added support for popup menus. These will eventually be attached to
objects on the map.
23 April 1998
- There is now an information area above the main map area. The
information area will be used to display detailed information such as
employment, maintenance costs, income, and food production.
- The money display, population display, and speed display are now
buttons that control what is displayed in the information area.
Clicking on the money button leads to the Financial Page, which will
eventually show income, maintenance, and spending. Clicking on the
population button leads to the Census Page, which shows employment,
jobs, food production, food consumed, and a few other things.
Clicking on the speed button leads to the Speed Page, which shows
information about how quickly the display is being updated.
- The status bar now has two sections: the left section shows the
currently selected tool; the right section shows either help about the
current tool or information about what is underneath the mouse
pointer.
22 April 1998
- I experimented with overlaying information about employment,
population, and so on, over the map but having information that
doesn't scroll when the map causes some design problems, and it leads
to slower screen drawing, so I took it out.
Last updated sometime in 1998.