| 3 August 1998 | |
| 1: (Internal) | Worked on the path-finding code. I'm investigating better data structures to use, which would speed up path-finding. If I get them to work, I will post the new path-finding code on my Games Programming page. |
| 1 August 1998 | |
| 1: | Changed the world map so that you can no longer drag the highlight rectangle off the top or right edge. |
| 29 July 1998 | |
| 1: (Internal) | Worked on the path-finding code. |
| 27 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Converted the display of altitudes and water depths to the metric system. |
| 26 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Added a context menu to the World Map that allows you to change the type of view: normal (terrain, roads, water, trees), terrain (water, trees, and shaded terrain), and civilization (roads, water, houses, farms, markets). To some extent, the "View" menu (from which you can control whether roads, structures, water, etc., are drawn) will control what is drawn on the World Map too. On the Civilization view, markets are bluish green, houses are red, and farms are purple. |
| 24 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Tweaked the market/house/farm placement algorithm some more. |
| 23 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Changed the erosion algorithm to take rivers and lakes into account. Since water flow already has erosion built in, the soil erosion is made weaker for watery areas. |
| 22 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Improved the food/labor algorithm to make food and labor flow from market to market more easily. It still needs more improvements. |
| 20 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Fixed a bug with the food/labor algorithm. |
| 2: | The Diety option, "Build Roads", now is biased towards building roads on an invisible grid of hexes. |
| 3: | The Diety option, "Build Roads", now builds both bridges and roads. |
| 4: | On the World Map, water was previously displayed on top of bridges. Now, bridges will be on top of water. |
| 5: | 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. |
| 6: | Added a context (right-button) menu to the world map; it does not do anything yet. |
| 7: | 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 []. |
| 8: | 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 | |
| 1: | 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 | |
| 1: | Removed Auto-Build from the menus. |
| 2: | Fixed some bugs with map creation. |
| 3: | 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". |
| 4: | 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 | |
| 1: | 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. |
| 2: | The farm bitmaps now vary with the season. |
| 3: | An asterisk marks the center of your city. The city center is used by some of the economics calculations. |
| 8 July 1998 | |
| 1: | Continued to work on a new food/labor algorithm, which uses markets. |
| 2: | 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 | |
| 1: | 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. |
| 2: | 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 | |
| 1: | Began to work on a new food/labor algorithm, which will take markets into account. |
| 27 June 1998 | |
| 1: | 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 | |
| 1: | Finished implementing the new building system. |
| 25 June 1998 | |
| 1: | 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. |
| 2: | Removed Auto-Build mode, since it was incompatible with the new building system. |
| 24 June 1998 | |
| 1: | Removed 'groundwater' from the simulation. It just wasn't working very well. Also removed the constant rain. |
| 2: | Changed the water scale (number of water units per altitude unit) significantly. |
| 3: | 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 | |
| 1: (Internal) | Cleaned up a lot of code to reflect changes in the C++ Standard. |
| 20 June 1998 | |
| 1: | Realized that the style of the list of changes has shifted from "X was done" to "Did X". Oops. |
| 17 June 1998 | |
| 1: | 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 | |
| 1: | Fixed a bug that caused erosion inside trenches. |
| 2: | 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 | |
| 1: | Fixed a bug that could lead to incorrect initialization of menu items that act like checkboxes or radio buttons. |
| 2: | Made the path-finding routines thread-safe. |
| 17 May 1998 | |
| 1: | 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 | |
| 1: | 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 | |
| 1: | 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 | |
| 1: | The popup menu currently starts the train going across the map. |
| 9 May 1998 | |
| 1: | Added support for popup menus. These will eventually be attached to objects on the map. |