New beginning

Hi folks!
Well that’s it, my last day at CA was this week and my work on Total war Attila is done. Now i’m…. jobless. And moving out of UK this week end, so quite busy times.
If there’s any Total war players out here, i hope you guys will enjoy Attila!
I havnt been inactive on Ymir either. I have completed the first phase of adapting the game to this newer version of the engine i’m using, and i have now started to upgrade my UI system to reach a more professional standard. No more flicking UI, new main menu, support for windowed mode, full-screen mode, different resolutions, resizing the game window in real-time… all the classics. Its actually quite time consuming create a system that can support all, and quite ungrateful as for the players this is just ‘normal’ stuff they won’t even pay attention to consciously.

Main menu WIP  Main menu WIP

I also have to (re)organise the whole program ‘infrastructure’ : like where and how the program files will be setup. The game will now have an installer.

Beeing nearly done with the UI upgrade, my next step is to redo a proper editor ( the one i used before was a really messy and temporary thing ). This editor will be now directly part of the main game client, and eventually accessible to players.
Its first function will be to create and edit worldmaps that can then be used to setup games.
I also plan to make a ” single player ” tutorial, and the ability to launch and setup games directly from the client main menu ( automatically launching a server in the background when starting a game ).
Basically this “infrastructure” thing is everything that goes around the game itself, and its quite a big job and an important one to keep building the game on a good base.

It will also imply steam, which brings me to my first objective of green-lighting the game. Only then i can start testing the game within steam itself, which would be its final environment. I’ll need this to deal with accounts, server lists, uploading new builds and updates and all. When you get green lighted, you get this special account with access to functions to interact with the steam servers, and you get to upload the game there and generate keys to test the game as final players would. I can’t preview all this until i’m actually green lighted… So this greenlight will determine a lot of things on how i organize the way Ymir works, which is why i’ll need this as soon as possible.