Phase 1 Plan

Over the last couple of months or so I've done virtually nothing on Mod Wars and although a large part of the reason for this was lack of time, in reality I was just putting off getting started.

I put together a little 'activity list' for things that I could be getting on with such as learning some more about Linux, working through some tutorials for a GUI package wxWidgets that I want to try out, drawing some simple graphics for the game etc. These are all things that will need to be done, but they are all 'non-core' activities. None of them actually move me forwards in my design or implementation in any way so they're still just another delay tactic and yet, I still didn't manage to do any of them!

Today I had a day off work and decided to try and do something positive to just get me going! I sat and thought about what I would like to implement as a very minimum for the first phase of development and it's quite simple: Just allow a player to connect to the server and nagivate around the grid. That's it! Still, because it's the first iteration there are a bunch of things that have to be done before anything else such as writing some basic networking code to allow the server to accept connections, and decide upon a message-passing mechanism for data between client and server. I'll want some logging functionality, configuration etc. These could be added later I suppose but because I absolutely know that I want them I'd rather just get them done first.

I knocked up a list of items and it came to 19 in all which was quite surprising considering how little there will be to show for it. Here's a snapshot of my little plan. As you can see I haven't bothered to put any timescales on it as they are meaningless when all I have is the odd hour here and there.