Federation & Empire

I move between games a lot, and after releasing the infantry builder a few weeks back I moved on to all sorts of other things.

The last few days I started working, yet again, on a easy to use hex map solution.  I've been close before, and even release one on planetsourcecode.com a few years back.  This time I used GDI+, and created some of my own algorithms.  I ended up with a working Federation and Empire map board, complete with outlines of regions, mouse overs, zooming at to any level, scroll bars, background tiles, textured/colored/empty hexagons, borders, hexagon numbers, and other text within each hex.  It seems to work pretty well.  The only thing I don't have yet is hexagon A* pathfinding, but I think I can implement that with enough time.  This hex mapping control also lets me make any kind of hex based game much easier.

I'll probably spend a bit of time in the near future playing with that, hoping to get fleet deployment and movement down before I think about moving on.

My next BT project will be started, and hopefully completed this weekend, it'll be a player finder.  See the thread here if you want to know more.

After that maybe a vehicle builder for BT, though it really seems like mechs are what everybody wants.  HMP is woefully outdated, and IMO a new version won't be out for *years*.  SSW has done an ok job at filling in, but it is far from complete and has a few errors I noticed last time I used it.  Since it was being actively worked on I decided that a mech builder was somewhat low priority, and indeed it is the most complex construction possible.  I've since started rethinking that, mostly based on how few people it seems like are interested in anything I'm doing, not to mention the significant portion of any input I tend to put on the BT site ends up being completely shot down, or people just don't want to discuss it.  I'm not a very average BT gamer and have never really "fit in" playing games since I as 16 (22 years ago now), but somehow I still love it.