Long paths

I promise this is my last post about path building for a long time :)

Remember I talked about not liking having to click for every path tile you build? Today I give you an alternative, use the mouse instead!

It works in the following way. After opening the path build window, click at the place where you want to start (the while tile cursor sticks to the position). In the window, click 'Long' (as in 'long build'). Now the system tries to build a path to the mouse cursor position in the vertical plane through the tile cursor. (In the attached picture, the mouse cursor is where I added the red dot.) If you move the mouse, the path changes. When you are happy, click the mouse, and the path is fixated (that is, you can move the mouse without the path following you). Then, like the single tile, click 'Buy' to buy the entire path.

That's much faster, isn't it? :)

The basic idea seems to be working nicely. If you experiment a bit with it, you'll notice there are still some quirks that need to be figured out, but to be honest, I have had quite enough of path building for some time.

Rewrite of the paths, connected path tiles

After the previous blog, I got a message from one Lord who found you could crash the program by building paths off the world (thanks for finding that, Lord).

Unfortunately, fixing proved difficult due to my somewhat naive way of coding it. There were three parties responsible: the world display, the path window, and a helper object that stored some selections. Rather than finding out who to blame exactly, I decided to rewrite it all, making the helper object the central entity. While you cannot see it at the outside, this makes the code much easier to deal with errors, since you know where to look. I fixed the off-world build problem, as well as few other problems.

Also invisible is the introduction of time. The game now keeps track of days, months and years.
Last but not least, the path tile building was changed to extend the edges of adjacent path tiles, which makes a much nicer path as you can see.