StandAlone Client - a breath of fresh air!

[>(FM)<]

Its a miracle people don't go insane looking at this for most of there day.

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If i'm even looking at the right thing.

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This big enough for you?

[chris1726354]

Its a miracle people don't go insane looking at this for most of there day.

The swf's are evil.

[Joriom]

This big enough for you?

That WAS big enough for me for a long time I even went one step further and downloaded Flash Projector from Adobe webpage to play VortexWars without a browser window open (you can see that in use on the fist page screen or here below). Yet, I'm still not satisfied

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I think I know a little bit about this, but its a multilayer flash, that changes things entirely.

The point is - I'm not even touching the oryginal Flash part of the game. I've started writing non-flash program from sratch that can comunicate with VortexWars serwer directly. Full screen - as in: no window border or title bar, REAL full screen - is just a first step of my project

If you're going to comment, please read OP carefully first

[GivinUDaHimelik]

Can't wait to see how this turns out.

[>(FM)<]

I wouldn't even know how to start, I couldn't figure out how to set it up to communicate.

[Joriom]

Hey guys!
I've decided to supplement this thread a bit with progress updates every so often so you don't feel out of the loop and to ensure everyone that this project is still alive! There might be some technical babble and boring parts but I'll try my best to keep it short and plain.

Work is going slower than expected due to some unpredictable events (like power outage on my street: 8am till 4 pm!) and personal reasons (I will never fell asleep while sunbathing ever again, I swear! It hurts...) but it's still one of my top priority tasks! I've just added sumary of targeted ideas, already implemented features and current "Work in Progress" tasks to the OP. There are some points marked with bold "up for debate" - I would like to hear your opinion on those topics the most as I feel it would be a nice addition but I'm not sure if it would not be perceived as cheating by some players.

On the technical part, at first glance there are some disadvantage of XNA over Flash. One of them is Graphical User Interface. Flash projects welcome you with user friendly, built-in user interface elements like text fields, easy text input, few-clicks ready buttons and stuff. In XNA you start with nothing of that sort. Ofc you can include some third party libraries ready to do that stuff for you, but I simply love to have my own stuff working on my own terms (and reinvent the wheel btw). And as thats my first bigger project in C# that requires graphical interface using XNA, I've decided to write my own small library (which obviously I didn't have yet!). I simply had to reinvent every single trivial thing like scaling fonts, positioning backgrounds and texts, even handling keyboard and mouse input to write something in login form / chat box or click a button. But that's mostly done now and it supports scaling window to any resolution you desire or toggling fullscreen! It's far from being perfect but I can fine-tune details later as I'm going to use that for other projects as well - it's kind of an investment.

Thats what was holding me back the most. I've got some of features already designed on paper and comunication with game server decrypted in most part but I need to present stuff to consumer which needs GUI to be done. Currently I'm working on multiline text fields (like thise in chat) and scrollable lists (like list of all chat messages, users in room, friends in social window etc). After I'm done with it tommorow I hope to implement basic lobby (with working chat and games list) the same day. That will be also the first version available for moderators to test as it will implement some fancy hidden mod-only spying tools

I hope you're not yet asleep If you have any questions or ideas, please tell me! Thanks in advance, Joriom.

[Fangfallen]

Fantastic work, Mate.

For that sunburn, try tea. Believe me, it soothes. (Basically dab COLD extra strong tea on trouble spots.)

[GivinUDaHimelik]

For the sunburn, if it is on your arms or chest, wear a long sleeve shirt at night to keep it from itching and in the morning, it shouldn't bother you even if it is still a bit red.

As to the game, keep it up! (I understood almost zero of what you said.)

[Fangfallen]

Could you make it so that when you mouse over a user's nameplate, a tooltip tells you what the color of the nameplate means?

[Joriom]

If I understand you correct you would like something like on the screen below? If so, something like that is already on my list of small things to add. I'm simply not sharing all those minor things cause there are way to many.

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