Here's a recent screen shot. I like the look of the map. The toolbar elements are ok but I just can't keep wasting time on re-skinning the whole interface. Fortunately, everything is image driven so it would be easy for a user to redo the entire interface as long as they stick with the size constraints.
The 10 buttons are displayed in play mode. They are (right to left, top to bottom):
1) Unit Production
2) Economy
3) Diplomacy
4) Research
5) Espionage
6) Trade
7) Options
8) End Turn*
9) Save Game*
10) Exit*
* implemented.
Obviously, everything is in a development state. But this is probably the look I'm going with.
As far as development of the game itself, I've added pathfinidng, rangefinding and a movement command. You can now click on a unit, right click on a target hex and select move from the dropdown menu. The unit will plot the shortest path and move to the new location.
Rangefinding will get a list of all cells within a given range of a source cell. Currently this is being used to allow the editor to fill in multiple cells at one time.
The editor has the following layers implemented:
1) Land type
2) Terrain
3) City
The next one up is rail. This will be edge based so it will be a bit trickier than the previous 3 that are all cell based. Rail will also include setting the infrastructure level of a cell which can have 1 of 4 levels:
0 - Little or no infrastructure. Possibly some roads and trails and small villages. No ports, or major roads or population center.
1 - Rural. Some roads, lots of small towns and villages and farmland in clear areas.
2 - Suburban. Better roads, rail and medium to large population centers.
3 - Heavy Urban. Very large population centers. Large, well developed areas with heavy infrastructure including large roads and bridges, heavy rail, factories, large appartment buildings and other heavy structures that can be used to provide cover and heavy resistance to invading units. These will be the most defensible hexes in the game.
There will be 2 types of rail. Russian and European. Only significant on the Eastern Front where invading armies will have to take the extra time to convert over rail which will slow up progress invading. Even though the US had a different sized rail, there is no point including it as it will never have to link up with non US guage rail.
