The research NPC

Published May 24, 2005
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I am still working at him, and HOPE to finish it by the end of the week.
Currently, it can list the researched, in progress, and unresearched* tech. The player can select which of the aforementioned techs he or she wants to view.

*Unresearched as in capable to research with the current technology, but research not stared yet.

On of the annoyances is that there might be as much as 100 or even more tech names that can be listed at once, especially if the research is pretty advanced. Since the client/server model is NOT designed for more than 25 or so dialogue menus with an NPC, I had to split the tech in pages, so, say you click on "View researched tech" you will see the first 20 researched tech names, and then another option "Next" and "Back" (if available).
This took a few hours to implement properly.

Today I have to work at the actual function that will display the tech, and give you some more info about it. This is very simple to do, but it's a lot of tedious strings work, as I have to concatenate some strings, and take into account empty strings, put new lines in place, etc. Very unrewarding and boring work.
Once I am done I might post some screenshots.

On Eternal Lands , Wytter implemented (at my suggestion) an alpha map loader, so that we can have dedicated alpha maps for some objects rather than generating the alpha maps dynamically from the texture itself. He did a pretty good job, and now that Roja (the artist and my wife) made some alpha maps for vegetation, that looks SOOOO much better. No more black spots on the edges of grass and plants in general. I dare to say that the quality of the plants is so good that they apear to be 2D renderings.
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Comments

gcs584

Sounding good. Keep the journal coming!

GCS584
May 25, 2005 02:19 AM
Saruman
Hey Radu are these alpha maps making their way into EL or are they just a Barren Moon feature?
May 25, 2005 01:24 PM
crusadingknight
As of right now, Roja only works on EL, so I'd assume they'll end up in both. Plus, radu said so. :P
May 25, 2005 02:24 PM
Raduprv
It was for Eternal Lands, but it will make it's way to the BM as well (we do that with all the patches that can be shared).
May 25, 2005 03:24 PM
Saruman
Very cool :) And yes if you didn't notice my sentence was actually backwards, I meant to ask if they would be making their way into Barren Moon or EL only, oops :)
May 26, 2005 12:56 PM
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