I'll give you 1000bc for that antique Precursor corvette...

The most visible thing that I worked on this week was the Trade Screen. It's going to be pretty much the same functionality as in GC1 and currently it's only using filler gfx, so I'm not going to post a screenshot for it yet. Apart from needing the new graphics, it's pretty much ready to go. However, you will be happy to know that the popup dialog for money and influence will have fast buttons like the troop loading screen. I'm thinking that these fast buttons may need to have scaleable increments as the max amount gets higher. Let me know your thoughts on this.

I also changed the calculation of production to use the system that is based on what you've built on your planets rather than just the planet quality.

I also did some work on our custom listbox class so that it can handle variable sized entries. I had done some work on this when I was working on the options screen, but some of the changes to the Planet Management screen exposed a few things that I'd forgotten. The cool thing about the ability to have variable sized entries is that it gives us more flexibility in desiging our screens without having to hardcode anything in either the code or the graphics, and we automatically have code that handles the rendering, the mouse detection, etc. If you can't tell, I'm pretty proud of it.

The custom listbox class was my idea in GC1 when we were working on the research screen because we needed a way to display both an image and a formatted text field in an entry, instead of just a single line of text which you could do with the original ListBox class. Its goal has always been to provide a consistent way to manage related but unique entries, but it's come a long way.

The next step is to make a listbox whose entries are displayed horizontally. I've got the initial code in (that's another thing I worked on this week), but I'll need a screen that implements it to make sure that I didn't miss anything. I find it rather fitting that the first screen to implement this will be the research screen. (Now isn't that a lovely tantalizing hint. But unless Mormegil posts a blog this week with a screenshot, you'll have to wait until next week when I've got it implemented.) I had previously made and used a class that just scrolls through images (for selecting a logo for a custom race) but that was more specific and I think is useful to have as a separate class, just as we still have and use the original ListBox that only displays text.

Another thing that I'd like to get working is showing partial entries when there's not quite enough space at the bottom of the listbox to show another entry. This is probably more of a polish point than a necessary feature so I may put that on hold for awhile.

So, next week I hope to have a screenshot of the new research screen in action for you. I may also start updating the save game code so that we'll have those ready to go for the beta, if nothing else is higher priority.

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