Those that read my blog already know about it, the project is making good progress (especially compared to some of my older projects) and I managed to get a lot of stuff done within the last few weeks.

First I implemented a basic AI, it'll construct buildings depending on the needs of a region, creates armies and (builds and) assigns units to them. It also knows what regions are most endangered and then will assign the biggest armies to that region and it'll also attack other regions. So you can now actually in fact play the game instead of just trying out the features.

Then I got my stuff done on the technology tree, which I (very much like the list of buildings) pushed back and back for a long time. But now I have most of the technologies to unlock buildings and such in the game, though the final technology tree will be around two times as "big" as the one now in the game.

And most recently I pushed myself to work on translations. At first I wanted to do this with the ITE of BDS2006, but somehow the documentation is so bad (it actually won't even mention how to exactly access the localized strings or how to switch betwen languages on the fly, if that's even possible) that I decided to make my own solution. So now I have another tab in my WeltEdit where I do localizations. It's a plain string grind, and eacht identifier (e.g. szTestString) has a single row for each language in the game. And those then get exported to XML and within the game I now only call my own function LocalStr which then selects the appropriate string for the given identitifer based on the currently set game language. Plain and simple but works.

And since reading is stress for the eyes, here is a new screenshot to relief your eyes a bit (click for bigger shot) :



Other than the above mentioned things I really did a lot of smaller things, like preparing some features to be used by the AI (e.g. automatic battles), added some stuff to the GUI for better usability, created a lot of small icons for buttons and dialogs, etc.
And next on my list is balancing (already did some smaller changes), which includes the prices of units, buildings, etc. That's something I have to do, cause otherwise I can't continue to work on AI.