The mis-adventures of a new Game Developer.
Mudflap's Articles In The Political Machine
April 1, 2004 by Mudflap
More bug fixing based on Alex's input. Added API for Activists, Political Opportunities, and Interview access. Fixed a bug in the votes equation. Added lazy evaluation for votes. Fixed another but in Movie Producer Fixed a couple of bugs in the Anchors.dat file. (VT->VA and MD->ME) Tweaked the keyboard input system more. Not perfect yet. There's more that needs to be done. I can't believe that there already isn't a proper solution in Pear. What did GalCiv do? Fixed a bug in the MainU...
April 2, 2004 by Mudflap
Fixed StateDetails button on Fundraising window. Looked into Cari's wonky formatted text fields. The coordinate calculations look correct. It may be something with the dynamic texture file. We'll definately have to investigate it more. More tweaks to the Asset window. Slowly getting there. Added more API for the AI. Incorporated Paul's tweaks. Fixed a hotspot bug in the cursors. Last minute runaround just for fun. Next time we have to stabilize more than 1 hour before the product ha...
April 20, 2004 by Mudflap
Daily 04/20/04 Added debug code to add activists on demand. This helps us test AI/Activist interaction. Use NUMPAD0 to create a new activist. Added a 'state' section to the ActivistID. This helps us differentiate between different activists that can be created on the same turn. Added code to the AI so that it throttles it's activist management. Now it doesn't move all the activists at one time. This was the cause of activists being stuck in mid air. Fixed the end of turn gap. Fil...
April 6, 2004 by Mudflap
Spent the morning discussing new MainUI options with Paul, Scott and Cari. People get confused because the currently selected state changes the picture in the center, but the buttons next to the picture work in the state that the candidate is in. More bug triage.... Fixed the asset window so that it properly displays the opponents information. Removed Popularity view and changed Gap to Popular Vote. Makes more sense that way. The Popularity view wasn't even working. Also tweaked the ...
April 6, 2004 by Mudflap
Bug triage. Assessing, assigning, etc... Fixed the bug where New Hampshire and New Mexico weren't displaying the space between the words. Changed the State interface so that the unspaced version is called the Tag and the DisplayName is now called Name. Added Ad API for Brad. Made official 04/05 build for Paul to test out Brad's new AI. Fixed MouseCursor hotspot (again). Fixed the activist visiblity problems. This is a case where regular enums are better than ULONGs because of t...
April 2, 2004 by Mudflap
Daily 04/02/04 Fixed the runaway stamina problem. I clamped it to the range 100.0 to 0.0. Hopefully this will take care of all the runaway number problems. Fixed the bug where the STOP in the AssetWindow is visible when it shouldn't be and fixed the crash that resulted from clicking the STOP button when it was visible when it shouldn't have been. Changed the MovieProducer to Plantable. Added code to hide the calendar during an election. Got rid of the blank frame Scott reported when an...
May 18, 2004 by Mudflap
Fixed a bug where a cheerleader was being disabled even though it wasn't planted. This caused the state that the cheerleader came from to lose awareness. Also changed the cheerleader so that it gave an awareness bonus instead of an awareness scale. This was incorrectly done earlier. Added an Operative API so that Brad can muck with Ops and VPs. Added Operative API so that Brad can hook it up to the AI. Added Political Strategy mode. You can access it through the view pulldown or b...
April 28, 2004 by Mudflap
Fixed errors in GAP colors. Added "nointro" flag. Added support for .dds files. Updated NewspaperWnd so that it can act as a win/lose screen. Fixed a logic error with interview snapshots. Misc changes for new build.
April 26, 2004 by Mudflap
More exit poll tweaks. Put it into the game. Added index operator ("[]") to the PollingData so that you don't always have to do "data.fPercents[PARTY_DEMOCRAT]". Not it's "data[PARTY_DEMOCRATS]". Added code to estimate voting population and electoral votes in case the exit polls are displayed before the actual election. Added Newspaper Window. Cleaned up some fonts. Cleaned up some forum errors and added forum titles. Added updated title screen ini from Paul. Added tempor...
April 26, 2004 by Mudflap
Finished cutscene framework. Also added dshow base classes. Massive merge checkin. Fixed bad name string in GameSetup. Removed the default running mates. Fixed a timing bug in the interview window. Since our performance is better now, the seconds timer was going too fast. Removed interview restrictions. Now you can attend all the different interviews. Checked in some new graphics for Paul. Hooked up the ExitPoll window. There's a crash if you try to go to it twice. I'll c...
April 25, 2004 by Mudflap
Changes for Tuesday build: Doubled the frequency if interviews. Increased the minimum number of questions asked to 2 separate questions. This also doesn't account for counter questions. So you may have more. Added code to track the amount of money and political capital a player spends on the campaign. Added code to calculate the current points player points. Also fixed some bugs with the interview responses. Added exit poll calculations. Added up to 5% error in state polling...
April 23, 2004 by Mudflap
More work on Alt-Tab. It looks there is something in the map display that is still holding onto data after an invalidate. This is causing the reset functions to fail. Looked over more DirectShow samples to find the one that is most adaptable. So far it looks like DrawXCL will work, but it'll take experimentation to make sure. Spent 90% of the day chasing my tail. But I finally got alt-tab to work. Now any problems associated with it will be considered bugs!
April 22, 2004 by Mudflap
More tweaks to the multithreaded load. Trying to stop the random crashes. This round, I removed the UpdateControls from the constructors and added them to the virtual Unhide() calls. Also cleaned up the current classes. Whole messes of changes. Tried to get Alt-tab and cutscenes working better. Didn't quite work out. I'll have to go to try a different tack on the cutscene thing so that it doesn't change the display mode. Alt-Tab is almost there, but I don't think I'll finish it by Tuesday...
April 21, 2004 by Mudflap
Added API to easily get CandidateStance. This will help Cari out when she does the candidate screen. Hide black window so that mouse messages get passed back to unhidden windows. Fixed minor bug in ads. Fixed the font problem on Windows ME. We were using AddFontResourceEx and RemoveFontResourceEX. They aren't supported on ME and below. Changed to calls to AddFontResource and RemoveFontResource. The only difference is that other applications will have access to our fonts while the gam...
May 19, 2004 by Mudflap
Fixed a small bug in campaigning. Added percents by party to the debug information. Added code to debug some load issues. Also added code to generate polmachine.ini if it doesn't already exist. Darkened the border colors to look more like CNN. Fixed a small bug with animations alt-tab behavior. Fixed some turn button errors. Fixed bug #259. Updated electoral vote data from current census data. (http://www.fec.gov/pages/elecvote.htm Retrieved 05/18/04) Added code to onl...