So yesterday I selected a date for the final assessment with my teachers. Turns out I only have five weeks left! So let’s see what I’ve got and what I’ve still got to do.

I didn’t have much time for programming in the last month, sadly. The time I did spend working on it I worked on some of the things that testers mentioned last month:

  • Each generated map in skirmish getting its own name(now it saves each generated map, and prevents a crash in Windows)
  • Map generation settings are now persistent with the lobby(You keep the settings whenever you generate a map)
  • Player spawn points are now set in a circle(or oval) around the center. This means maps are less unfair, and more of the map is used. Screenshot:

Minimap with spawn points in a circle

You can change the distance of player spawns from the center. Maybe later I’ll also add a “jitter” option for spawn points so they aren’t always exactly at the same angle from the center. That’s especialy important for maps with only a few players. I’m also going to finally make blockades(cliffs and such), so you can’t go around the map so easily. Maps will finally take place in lands with different terrain from the Netherlands.

For the rest I’ve updated my own plan, spoke to teachers a lot, and been documenting stuff. Sadly a lot of my work in the next few weeks will also be that. I need to write a research report, a reflection on the project, a vision about open source, my design principles in developing the project, and some other stuff. I’m probably not going to have the actual code ready for merging in OpenRA at the end of the five weeks. But I’ll promise to keep working on it afterwards until it is. I didn’t do all this work for nothing!

My plan for the coming time:

  • week 1: Write down research theory and methods, create heuristics for good maps
  • week 2: Perform research with “experts” and peers at school, write down my software design principles
  • week 3: Improve generator based on research (programming), write down software design implementation
  • week 4: Write down research results, conclusions, create open source vision
  • week 5: Finish reflection, write about quality monitoring

I think that’s everything. Quite a tight schedule. Hopefully doable. Good luck to me.