I'm back! I told you Sid Meier's Civilization was my Kryptonite and it basically stole my last two weekends playing it. The first weekend was no real surprise and I had planned to just play it all weekend. But I got sucked in again the following one while doing a few productive things like laundry. In any case it's a very good continuation of the franchise and worth a look if you like that sort of game.

Now, onto what I worked on this last week. I decided to put more console work off to the side (with appropriate notations on my todo list) in favor of something a little more in the vein of a gameplay feature. So to that end I implemented what is the core gameplay loop of a tactical strategy game (along the lines of XCom or Final Fantasy Tactics). Now I obviously already had the game loop doing all the windows messaging, managing frame processing and rendering. This was the gameplay loop to control the player's interaction with the game.

I added a new component and couple objects to act as players. Right now this component consists of an array of handles which are the ships controlled by that player. I also added a new component to handle unit stats and added that to all the ships that I had created and added them to one of the two players. The stats component isn't particularly complicated right now, just an arbitrary mapping of keys & values. Long term I don't expect that gameplay will rely heavily on this, but it's really nice for experimentation and prototyping. And it's not unit/spaceship specific. Right now all the ships have two stats: Power & Supply. The game loop then consists of:

1. Player Turn Start - Set all that player's ships supply stat to their power stat value
   
2. Move unit - User clicks another tile, path the unit to that tile, decrement supply by 1
   
3. When supply reduced to zero, move the selection to the next unit
   
4. Continue moving units and rotating the selection until all units controlled by player have a 0 supply stat
   
5. When there are no units with available supply, move to the next player and return to step 1
   

I also added a few other related elements like:

• tabbing to rotate the selection of the current unit
  
• preventing pathing from occurring when the current unit has a 0 supply stat
  
• preventing the current unit from becoming one controlled by other players if you clicked a tile that had a unit you didn't own in it. Using the mouse to change unit selection was already supported.