Tournament Updates: Behind The Scenes
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As you know, I decided to go all out on the updates for tournament round 26. This round features the largest amount of updates that I've made for a new tournament round, and a few of the updates were minor and were not announcement, but were updates none the less. One of the big updates was the alliance announcement system, a feature that had been requested initially when the TE alliance system was first introduced and it continued to prevail as a common request throughout the tournament rounds. Having decided to go forward with another tournament round I knew that I wanted to code in some updates to liven things up, as well as to use as a test bed for updates to come for standard edition. So, I set out to create the much requested TE alliance announcement system. As I thought about how I wanted to structure the feature, I realized that much of it already existed on one of the other games that I run, Cyber Citizens. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I went over and grabbed the pieces of code that I needed and the update ended up being fairly easy to implement.
Screenshot of alliance announcement system in TE:
Screenshot of political party announcement system in CC:
A big update that I've been mulling over lately was the ability to assign leaders or generals to a nation's military in order to help further customize nations. I had the basic system for how I wanted everything to work in my head, but I wanted to include something like an avatar to give the generals some personality. I actually thought on ways to do this quite a bit and debated over creating images that represented a general's rank but that still didn't seem personal enough. Then I realized that I had already built a similar system in Tour of Generals years ago. When I was developing that game I used a program to model 3D faces, and while some of the face images admittedly look a little cheesy, I thought as long as I let the players change the character's image to suit their preference, then it should work fine.
Screenshot of general page in TE:
Screenshot of unit page in ToG:
I guess the lesson for me here was don't reinvent the wheel. lol. It has been a while since I've had time outside of real life to commit the hours that it takes to push out updates like this, but the time that I spent working on them over the weekend was enjoyable to me. If all goes well with the Military Generals update then I'd like to implement the feature in standard edition. I've also been thinking about how to get the (now superior) TE alliance system over in SE...
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