casualyt31 / computerwars

Advance Wars engine for the Windows and Linux platforms

Computer Wars

Advance Wars engine for the Windows and Linux platforms. Planned features:

• Customisable Advance Wars engine: countries, graphics, units, terrains, COs, etc. will all be customisable, as well as a lot more.
• The ability to not only modify the game using AngelScript but also the ability to modify the engine itself if you so wish.
• Map maker.
• Internet play.
• Campaign engine.
• Cross-platform: Windows and Linux. I may also support macOS if the stars align.
• Controllable via mouse, keyboard, or gamepad/joystick.
• Ability to easily add in Artificial Intelligence (implementing the AI is not a main goal, but it will be invaluable for the campaign side of the engine).
• In-depth documentation, tutorials, and examples once the project is ready for release.

Starting From "Scratch"

Since the release of version 0.0.5, I have been reworking the game engine from the ground up. I'm hoping to copy over a lot of existing code, so hopefully, it will not take extremely long to get to where I left off (0.0.5).

Until version 0.0.6 comes out, I can't guarantee a functioning game. Check out the 0.0.5 tag instead if you want to play around with the latest version.

Tracking Progress

I've moved over to Jira and Confluence from Trello. Unfortunately, Jira is not publicly accessible in the free version, so I will have to grit my teeth and make use of the GitHub Projects feature to provide a high-level overview of my progress publicly. The epics and stories in my Jira will also be given cards on this repository's project page.

Dependencies

Todo (I likely won't be changing these much, if at all, so check 0.0.5).

Links

• GitHub Project
• Discord Server

Gitmoji

I like the idea of Gitmoji, but I find that there are a lot of emoji for the same thing, and some that are missing. So I decided to use my own emoji:

Coding

Emoji	Name	Meaning
✨	sparkles	Add new feature/s.
🔨	hammer	Update/improve behaviour of existing feature/s.
🐛	bug	Fix a bug.
🎨	art	Improve the structure/format of the code.
🚧	construction	Commit code that is a WIP.
♻️	recycle	Refactor code.
💥	boom	Introduce breaking changes.
🔥	fire	Remove code, tests, or files.
⚠️	warning	Fix code causing compiler warnings.
⛔	no_entry	Fix code causing compiler errors.

Testing

Emoji	Name	Meaning
✅	white_check_mark	Add passing test.
❌	x	Add failing test.
🧪	test_tube	Write tests that have not yet been run.

Documentation

Emoji	Name	Meaning
📝	memo	Add or update documentation.
💡	bulb	Add or update source code comments.
📄	page_facing_up	Add or update markdown files (readmes, licence, etc.).

Assets

Emoji	Name	Meaning
🔧	wrench	Add or update CMake, Doxygen, and other development scripts.
🖼️	framed_picture	Add or update art assets.
🎵	musical_note	Add or update audio assets.
📜	scroll	Add or update JSON assets, or AngelScript assets that override JSON assets during execution.
⚙️	gear	Add or update binary assets.

Dependencies

Emoji	Name	Meaning
⬆️	arrow_up	Upgrade dependency.
⬇️	arrow_down	Downgrade dependency.
➕	heavy_plus_sign	Add dependency.
➖	heavy_minus_sign	Remove dependency.

Git

Emoji	Name	Meaning
🔀	twisted_rightwards_arrows	Merge branches.
🔖	bookmark	Release new version.

computerwars's Issues

Update repository

Add gitignore. Cleanup file structure a little once I've completed Doxygen documentation.

Integrate AngelScript

Complete scripts class: figure out the best way to incorporate AngelScript. Multiple modules or a single module? Hot reloading? Caching? How to best reuse context objects?

Animated_drawable Division by 0

Do my animated_drawables handle division by 0 if delta returns 0?

Update code documentation: use Doxygen

Instead of maintaining a separate documentation file, I should include documentation in the code which I can then use to generate separate documentation files using Doxygen.

Refactoring Required

I'm making progress, but I've hit a small problem while making my game engine classes drawable (having to pass a raw pointer of an army to a unit via setOwner() because there is no easy way to create a weak reference to this using weak_ptr). It should be easily fixable, but this requires a good look at how I've designed my classes up to now, in particular paying attention to how I've linked my classes up and how (shared_ptr or weak_ptr, unit's owner (army) and army's unit (unit), etc.).

I'd really like to keep this design approach of maintaining circular references between objects (unit-army, tile-army, etc.), because it's really easy for the client to interact with (I can just access a unit's army directly without having to perform multiple calls like I had to in my old version of the engine, which was [thankfully] not public), and the use of shared_ptr and weak_ptr make handling circular references a breeze.

My idea is to introduce factory functions which will automatically handle these links when creating new units or tiles, for example. I'll need to adjust my code design accordingly, though, so I'll be going back to the drawing board for a short while.

Update Documentation

Now is a good time to update the documentation fully with what I have so far. After this, I probably need to work on the fundamentals of the CO classes, and then work on the army class, an instantiation of which represents an army on the map.

Animated_drawable virtual destructor!

Make animated_drawable's destructor virtual if isn't already!

Carry on with Terrain and Unit classes

Fix up the unit class and separate “static” and “dynamic” data into two separate classes (follow UnitType-UnitBank-Unit architecture I worked on privately).
Ensure terrain classes work and refractor behavioural methods away: I will deal with this at a later point where I will have the most knowledge of how everything will fit together.
Start to think about how I’m going to manage things like pipe seams: terrain tiles that are treated as uncontrollable units that can be attacked.

Design Game Engine Architecture

Now that I've had a stab at making the actual engine, I can see where I've gone right and where I've gone wrong, and refactor now before it becomes too difficult to do so. Please see main.cpp for more details.

One other AW Clone worth mentioning

There is another clone still being actively developed: https://github.com/ThislsAUsername/DefendPeace. I should add it to the readme as well as update the readme in general.