Chipping away at the detail work, getting to the harder parts that I was waiting for later for bonus points:
- Chat messages now cross-translate when sent between different languages!
- All 4 players can type to each other in their own language and translates back to theirs
- Original language show under translation in parentheses
- Press ‘m’ to Highlight all your movable pieces, toggles off/on nice and slick
- Added Joystick and Keyboard ability to select pieces and move to skquares! (was not easy code, but works nice now)
- Press ‘,’ ‘<‘ Joystick LT and ‘>’ ‘.’ Joystick RT to cycle through movable pieces or highlight open moves
- Press ‘/’ or Joystick X to select piece or make move
- Press ‘n’ or Joystick Y to unselect pieces or moves and go back
- Known bug: The order that it goes through your pieces can get out of whack and different based on which side of the board the player is. That’s a hard one to correct since it’s based on some convoluted logic when checking for moves and stuff. May try to sort the select order later, but it’s too much work to be worth it.
- Fixed bug when extra corner skquares are disabled, pieces were still able to pass through it. Forgot to null them on the board array.
- Press ‘p’ or Joystick B to Play a Random Move for current player. Selects random piece, then random valid square and moves automatically. Start of a dumb AI.
- Checks if random move is safe, if not it rolls the dice again.
- Checks if King is in check, if not it first searches for all of the King’s possible moves and tests for danger, if the King has no way to walk out, we scramble for another safe move to get out of check. This is where it gets sticky..
- Trying to make move prioritize kills when it’s safe (but ran into difficulties testing safety without first creating a hypothetical board with possible kill move to determine. Ended up creating very aggressive pseudo-AI that will attack anything without consequence. Fun for testing, hard for coding.. Don’t yet want to look ahead moves, but trying to look ahead one step is hard enough.)
- Random Move now only kills if safe to do so. Closer to being intelligent.
- Random Move also looks for pieces in threat with no protection and tried to move to safe skquare.
- Trying to make it smart, but not too smart. Working out the kinks, but still makes an unexpected move under Check. The pseudo-AI is opportunistic, defensive but does not look ahead moves, and I don’t know if I want it to..
- In multiplayer game, if network player disconnects, added new vote to continue “Play Random Moves Until Player Returns”
- Implemented the continuation of game with dropped player with Auto Move on their turn
- Changes availability of game in Lobby to open, waiting for that player to log in again. Still needs to be worked on…
- Press ‘k’ to highlight pieces you could kill in red and pieces that are safe to kill in yellow, and again to turn off highlights. Why not, already wrote the test function, was easier than I thought.
- Press ‘l’ to highlight pieces
- Press ‘;’ or Joystick A to Highlight all movable pieces green, safe to kill red and dangerous to kill in yellow, threatened with protection yellow
- Press ‘o’ to Highlight all dangerous skquares with a purple marker (not too useful, but implemented for move testing)
- Press ‘i’ to Highlight all safe skquares with a cyan marker (this might be considered cheating by some, maybe add option to disable helpers in game creation)
- Lowered the Skyline so the table is floating in the sky with low horizon. Will make scene customizable later.
- Adjusted the Sky time of date to begin 2-22-17 (my birthday) with longitude, latitude on 33rd Parallel , weather shifting, and parameters to feel better to me.
- When a game starts, the sky’s time will be sun coming up at 7am, and transitioning across the sky at just about the right speed of a game. Will fine tune as we play more.
- Fixed bug when resetting board under certain circumstances, King and Queen weren’t returning properly if killed
- Changed skip move option of Unlimited Time to Move into Random Move on Times Up
- Implemented the Random Move when player’s time runs out
- Added Hurry Up warning 8 seconds before Times Up which flashes all player’s moves then killable and threatening pieces (Open to suggestions on the way it looks)
- Created Practice Game Modes menu after pressing Play Practice Game
- Select “Free-play Turn-less”, “Single 4 Player”, “1 vs 3 Computer” and “2 vs 2 Computer” modes (Open to better labels)
- Random Auto-Play works nicely on computer players, now it’s a game!
- When in practice games, will pause timer when the start screen comes up and resume timer when the camera comes back on.
- Added Enable/Disable Move Helpers as an option for a new multiplayer game, saves as room property and disables keyboard i,o,p,k,l,m.;
That’s not all what I changes, but the details are smoothly integrated in the game now. Feels so much better with a working dumb ai and the move helpers that add so much to the gameplay, I’m glad I took all that time to code out the piece and skquare checking tools, hard but easy and fun. More to come, please test and see if I’m missing a detail.