Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Mission Briefings

In prototype #2, I'm aiming for a simple mission briefing screen which will consist of a continue "button" and a briefing "text box".  Like the start up screen, the continue "button" will end the briefing screen and load the next step in the game, that being the actual mission.  The briefing "text box" will display the instructor's "lesson" to the new pilot.

In addition, I want to add sound to the scene.  The sound manager already exists with full capability to create the sound portion of the briefing.  Simulating the instructor's speech will be handled by the trigger maanager, and the text representation of the instructor's speech will be added to the "text box" via the trigger manager.

This means that I have to add another trigger type to the game.  Like the audio triggers, this trigger will be a text trigger and will have a "txt" prefix.  It will utilize a chat controller to print this text in a chat box, the previously mentioned "text box".  Later in the development cycle, I might merge this new trigger type into the audio triggers. 

The basic structure of the Chat data structure in the Battlestar.dll file will be:

int OID
string TriggerID
string AudioID
string Content

The ChatManager class will contain the standard operations of: save, load and delete.  The Load function will need a method to load an item using the AudioID.

The game's chat manager will require a source, or output, game object.  This will work like an audio source in the game's SoundManager.  When a "txt" trigger activates, it's data is passed to the ChatManager (the game one, not the Battlestar.dll).  This manager is charged with displaying the contents in the chat box.  In many ways, I expect alot of similarities between the SoundManager and ChatManager in structure and functionality.

Anytime during the briefing scene, the player can opt to end the briefing and go to the mission.  This is accomplished by the continue "button".  It should operate in an identical manner to the start up screen's "start" button.

2 comments:

  1. Well, I started to add text records for each audio trigger already in the game. In addition, I started to create the audio triggers for the tutorial #1 briefing. However, I discovered that Siaqodb uses a 100 character length as a default for a string's length.

    This was too short for a majority of the "txt" triggers. I will have to go back and redo those triggers...

    I'll start on that tomorrow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I fixed the issue, and I created all the triggers (I think) for the briefing for tutorial #1. Now, I just have to create the briefing scene and see what explodes next...

    ReplyDelete