Progress Update 2018-12-30
Hi all. Sorry it’s been so long since the last update. I’ve been working hard for you over the holidays – here’s one last update for the end of the year.
Since last time, I completed my refactoring of the existing GUI code, and RWE has now learned about the orders menu. RWE now loads the appropriate faction’s orders menu when the game loads and supports a few of the buttons on it. Specifically, the Move, Attack, Stop and Fire Orders buttons are wired up and have an effect in the game. The other buttons, for now, are useless.
To support the Fire Orders button I implemented the concept of “Hold Fire” into unit behaviour. “Return Fire” is sadly not yet supported, as this requires the unit to know when another unit has damaged it, which is not yet possible. At the moment, “Return Fire” behaves the same as “Fire At Will”.
I have learned a lot of things about TA GUI gadgets over the last few weeks that does not appear to have been documented anywhere. I have long lamented that there is no official wiki where we can centralise the most up-to-date knowledge about TA, so for lack of a better outlet right now I have started a wiki for RWE on GitHub. Currently it has one page, which documents the GUI file format and is based on Dark Rain’s old text file (see the credits on the wiki page), but with some cleanup and significant new additions by me. In particular I have documented the effect of the “attribs” property on buttons.
Next I will work on tidying up things with the orders menu and start implementing support for the build menu. Supporting the build menu will be a significant milestone on the road to enabling the commander to build buildings.
Today’s gif shows off the new orders menu and working buttons.
