Technical questions

[tuesday4am]

I noticed that the game is written in Java, which is not a popular choice for non-heldheld plaforms. I'm curious to know why you chose this language. Also, how will the game be distributed on the two platforms? Will they be optimized for the platform? Will they be compiled to machine code for each platform or bytecode? I assume the former, otherwise the game would be playable on Linux. Will both versions (Mac and PC) be available on the same CD? Either way, I'm very interested to see how this game plays, since I dabble in developing strategy games in Java myself. (In this vein, I could ask all sorts of questions, but this is not a game development forum. But if I could ask just one, out of curiosity, how do you handle the hexagon grid coordinates? Square grid? Interlaced? Flattened 3D?) Thanks. Look forward to playing the game.

Edit: One last question. What did you use for the graphics? Graphics2D or OpenGL? Thanks again.

[firepowerjohan]

I chose Java since I forecasted that with increasing CPU power, you would not need to get the maximum performance for strategy games and because I felt that from all the languages I tried so far (but certainly there are languages which I did not try that are as structured and good as Java) I needed to be less "tech-freak" in order to produce good code. I felt in Java, I was more productive since it forces you to organize things in a good way. Though Java can be very high performance, it is in practice not done since you are then abandoning the good sides with Java.

The distributed version will contain ALL. English, German, French, PC, Mac support all in same. Whether Linux or Unix will be officially supported is a question of time to test and offering support for that platform. We will not try to optimize the game for any platform, no need for ti. Java is platform independant but you can never assume things will work 100% until testing. Even if there is no runnable clickable file for Unix/Linus, the game can start up from the Command prompt on thos platform and work, but if we decide not to include then we can ofcourse offer no support on such platforms.

I am not sure what you mean about the Hexagons, if you look at the screenshot you might see how they are formed.
I use Graphics2D for the game (passive rendering in a loop combined with paintImmediately plus flow control to avoid simultaneous stuff tiliting the graphics).