Nieuport 17 and Siemens Schuckert D.I

Nieuport 17 and Siemens Schuckert D.I - The Germans created the plans from a captured Nieuport.

Happy holidays to everyone. They are happy holidays for me because I will be getting days and days of free time to progress Hexcell.

This week has been very hectic for many reasons outside of Hexcell. The final days of work for the year, shopping, parties… but I have had time to get some work done.

The first change is the Blue Max new game invite interface. Up until now it was an extremely crude form that got the job done in a very ugly way. It is still kind of ugly, but I am much happier with it now. When setting up a new game you can select a scenario (unfortunately there is still only one) and see details about it including an image. Then you can invite players from your friends list or by searching the database for players. Currently you can also manage your friends list through the same interface, but I may remove that functionality when the friends page gets some love. The design and colours definitely have to be redone. In doing the invite system I also learned about event delegation in jQuery – a must have for events on items in dynamic lists.

The Albatros D.III,  Nieuport 17 and Siemens Schuckert D.I have been traced and coloured. The Albatros trace replaces the images I was using from the original Blue Max game. That means as of now I am no longer using others’ material.

The Nieuport and SS D.I are new and they have their own scenario to try them out. Plans for the SS D.I were drawn up from captured Nieuports. The similarities were obvious when I traced the two planes – the tail and wings of both planes are essentially the same – see the image above.

I have introduced a few more friends to Hexcell as play testers. Now I am playing with others and not just myself I am seeing more things to fix and tweak. When I play-test by myself I usually play one game through to completion in almost real time. However when playing with one of my play testers I play multiple games, taking one turn a day. In this second style of play you go into and out of games and it is much more important to know status of all your games at the same time.