Building Construction

In order to finish off building construction to the alpha stage several pieces were needed:

• Context Menu
• Placement UI
• Material Selection
• Wealth tracking
• Technologies

There were a few bug fixes involved: getting the wealth tracking working right, fixing the graphic for updating trees and so on. The wealth tracking revealed that my quadtree accidentally double inserted items. When I added silverleaf trees, I discovered I had a typo in my code that accidentally changed all trees to the graphic of the one that was just cut down. Imagine my surprise when all my silverleaf trees became pine trees!

Context Menu

The context menu interface has changed to be a keyboard based interface. I left the right-click to show functionality but the primary way to show it is to press the "B" key on your keyboard. The reason? I kept having units selected and then I would right-click only to order the units to do something I did not want instead of showing the right-click menu. Durr!

Basically the context menu shows the base options (which will eventually become icons) and then the sub-categories and then finally the final options. It will also let you quickly open up the faction management screen. I think there will also be a single keyboard shortcut to just go straight into the management screen but that will be for when I create those screens. For now just the context menu!

Opening up the context menu shows this:

We select build

We select Cultural buildings:

Finally, we select Inukshuk

Now we see we can place the building anywhere and also select the materials with which we can construct it.

After we place buildings we can see that there is a bunch of rocks that mark the construction site:

So we can see a preview when we move the mouse around where the building will be and in the lower right corner we see what materials we will be using to construct it. Eventually I will add a resource overlay in the top right corner so that you can see your wealth - liability. You can spend into debt and the display will show negative (indicating that you should get more resources).

Wealth Tracking

Wealth tracking is accurate to the game tick. In actions that affect faction wealth it updates it on the fly. This is a bit dangerous (if I miss a spot in the code then the wealth is incorrect). To make up for this, I have a debug assert that does a resource wealth audit every 100 game ticks. If there is a mismatch between calculation at that moment and the current cached value of wealth then an exception is thrown. This will help me debug any place I have missed proper wealth tracking.

Wealth is defined by having resources stored in structures (therefore units carrying items do not constitute as part of wealth). Liability is defined by structures placed and how much more resources they need. Once industry is added, liabilities will also include work orders and item requests.

Technologies

The technology UI will be next but for now, factions record their technology in a std::unordered_map where it is technology ID to tech level. Many techs are repeatable and so int to int is a reasonable structure. Technology limits how many materials you can select and what buildings you can construct. Right now the two test structures a inukshuks (which the faction begins with) and tents (which the faction does not have). So when you open up the menu, only buildings for which you have the technology show up. Additionally, attempting to select materials beyond the limit results in nothing happening (there will be an error message added in the future). I will also probably have to add information in the material selection on technology limits such as "You may select up 1 material per item type".