So as I was implementing the mechanics of selecting objects and getting information about them, I was reminded about just how hilariously awful my character name generation code from MMORPG Tycoon 1 was. Generating such unpronounceable character names as “Iqkeb”, “Adqiy”, and “Ojkage”, it really is going to need a big overhaul for MMORPG Tycoon 2.
Subscriber names, on the other hand, are mostly okay, if sometimes a little bit old-fashioned and US-centric, as they’re being generated via statistical data from a 1908 US census. I probably won’t have to modify those immediately (but in a later version of MMORPG Tycoon, it might be nice to start thinking about the home countries of subscribers, and generate appropriate names and play schedules based upon that).
New today: I’ve modified toons, monsters, buildings, roads, and the graveship to all derive from a common base class, which handles the mechanics of being selected by the cursor, and implements the selection mechanics. Now when you click on something, information about that object appears in a box in the top middle of the screen. Still to do is adding a button which will bring up a detailed information/settings window to show further information. This has also brought to my attention that there’s something going slightly wrong about selecting roads; roads seem to be acting as though they’re closer to the camera than they should be, and so it can be very difficult to select a player who’s moving along the road, rather than selecting the road itself. I’m kind of dreading jumping into that collision code and trying to debug what’s going wrong.. but that’s what I’m going to have to do. I’ll look at it tomorrow.
Also today, I drastically improved the look of the region boundaries. You might recall the region boundaries from earlier screenshots; they were huge sharp plateaus, and often had giant artifacty diagonal shadows running in patterns along their sides. These new region boundaries are much softer and the lighting on them is heaps better. I’m still expecting to modify them to look more like mountain ranges, but at least I’m not embarrassed to include them in screenshots any more!
