A fair warning the next couple of development updates are going to be rather short and boring given the nature of the work being done…

I started adding a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to the game, starting with shortcuts to switch between the different map views (Biomes, Coastlines and Elevation). Next is adding shortcuts to switch between all the different map overlays, which are many. But before starting with it I decided to do a rewrite of the very old code that takes charge of triggering map updates and redraws. Most of this code was written when I had very poor knowledge of how Unity3D’s UI and event system framework worked. The GUI manager I created when I started the project is chock-full of unnecessary code that tries to do everything, from running the simulation, to handling map updates, to basically handling all dialog interactions. My intention right now is to move parts of the GUI Manager code to other classes that are better suited for specific tasks, such as moving all map drawing code to the Map script. Also, while adding the shortcuts for overlays, I want to remove some of the overlay dialog handling code and let Unity3D’s event system take care of it as it is supposed to.

This is going to be just a gradual/partial rewrite. I’m modifying things as needed while implementing the keyboard handling code. And I’m not going to continue the GUI Manager rewrite after all the shortcuts I planned to add are in. Nevertheless, expect this to take a while, perhaps another two weekends, but hopefully less than that.