For issue tracking I've been using a free hosted issue tracker called Unfuddle. It also provides source code hosting for SVN and Git projects, but I don't use either of those for this project (I'm using Mercurial).
Here's an example of my task list, this one is for the "Tornados" implementation (I'll share more about my current tasks later):
Once there is a task in the tracker, it's time to implement it. I'll just choose the task to generate the "small tornado animation." I'm not really an artist, but I've been using Blender for all modelling needs.
In blender, I have a base model for the tornado and then have a particle system attached to it. The mesh rotates over ~100 frames. Here's the model:
To generate the animation, I run a python script that moves a camera in 45 degree rotations for each animation frame (I only render 1 in 7 frames for the in-game animation). This generates a list of images for each frame and rotation.
Using a small C# program I wrote (mostly as a learning experience), the images are combined to yield a final animation. Here the tornado only has one rotation angle so there's only one row of animation:
Next: I add an entry to the gamedata file that describes a frame of animation, the interval, and other things like that. Nothing too exciting here. The animation is now loaded by the game.
The next step is to add a unit that will use the tornado animation. The unit is classified as a flying unit, so it's rendered on top of buildings. Again, this is just editing a text file so nothing worth showing. But at this point, I can add the unit in-game:
The last part is to commit the changes to the Mercurial repository. No code has been written but what's getting committed is the animation image and the game data file changes. By the way, I'm using a hosted Mercurial repository on Bitbucket. I've been using the service for about 9 months now and have no complaints (and it's free).
I'm not sure how exciting the revision graph is, but here it is:
You can see I sometimes branch out -- I tend to switch between to machines to develop on (desktop and laptop) and sometimes I don't have internet access.
Well, that's all for now. Next time I'll show you some code changes.
