This is the February edition of the monthly technical update of Digital Extinction (GitHub).

This month we had two new first time contributors, @0HyperCube and @Polostor (Péťa Tománek).

Here is the summary of the changes since the last update. It consists of commit range 3dbac4e..a80b429. There were 66 non-merge commits in total.

The most notable updates are:

• several multiplayer related screens were added to the menu:
  • sign-in / sign-up
  • game listing
  • game creation
• building draft is now semi-transparent and colored green or red based on obstacles,
• double clicking on a unit or building leads to the selection of all visible entities of the same type,
• the mouse cursor is now confined to the game window,
• the camera can be moved horizontally with arrow keys,
• pop-up in-game menu was added, it is opened with Escape key,
• work on game head-up display / panel (HUD) was initiated,
• various errors are now briefly displayed as toasts in the UI,
• support of map hashing was added and deterministic map paths are used,
• several small fixes, code quality improvements.

Multiplayer

The work on the multiplayer has continued. Most of the progress in this respect has been made in the game menu. Users can now create a new account or sing in, list available games on the server and setup a new game.

There is still a lot of work ahead of us. Lobby server has to be started individually because there is no publicly hosted instance yet. The largest chunk of work lies in the design and implementation of the planned p2p communication between individual clients.

HUD

A visual head-up display / panel placeholder has been added. This required some modifications to how mouse interaction is handled.

As can be seen in the top-most screen recording, the panel is at the bottom of the screen and consists of three parts. The left black square will contain information about selected entities (units and buildings), the right square will be an interactive game mini map and the middle panel will hold buttons which control actions of selected entities (e.g. construction).