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Since it?s been awhile I decided to write up a new Developer Blog. This blog will be an overview of one of many new features of PR:BF2 1.0, the Kit Selection Spawn Screen. Taking you from an idea to a full on feature of Project Reality. It?s going to be a hefty read and if you?re not interested in reading a wall of text then I advise you to watch the PR:BF2 [URL="https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f380-project-reality-news/117411-project-reality-devcast-2-a.html"]Devcast #2[/URL].

The whole process from the first idea to finally being able to use it properly took about 6 months with days of constant coding and some weeks off.

It started with me getting bumped to R-DEV after I assisted the team in several tasks over the years beginning with server tutorials, tester, Tech Team Lead and finally being a Lead Developer with focus on the PR Testing Team.
I wanted to get deeper involved in modding in general and was looking for a coding project besides my other daily tasks.

So I stumbled upon this public thread [url]https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f10-pr-bf2-general-discussion/107795-alpha-project-got-right.html[/url] and decided to look for a similar solution for PR. Gladly [B]Hjid[/B] from [URL="http://www.moddb.com/mods/alpha-project2"]Alpha Project[/URL] offered me his help and gave me some things to start with.
[IMG]http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/6454/spawnh.jpg[/IMG]
As you can see the first try was actually pretty similar to what we have now but remember this was a single button for one of 16 factions in game.
Also nothing of the back end was done yet, sure you could click the button but nothing happened.

I started a discussion in the DEV forums and we all agreed it would be a useful feature that people already had in mind but never thought of implementing it due to the large amount of work to create and maintain such a system.
The Military Advisors also strongly supported the idea mainly due to the fact it would give us 2 additional kit slots on the spawn screen.
I presented the team my first video so we were able to see it in action:
[YOUTUBE]k1RSJR5QCjo[/YOUTUBE]
It wasn't actually working but the team liking the idea kept me motivated.
The next video gave me the impression it works even though on this state it had a few of very annoying bugs, which later exposed to be quite hard to fix:
[YOUTUBE]T-MFWXMjRUk#[/YOUTUBE]
A few weeks later, after discussions about kit type and order and some graphical suggestions by AncientMan it looked like this:
[img]http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/2733/menumpu.jpg[/img]
Because I couldn't imagine making this effort for every single faction I also started to program a small tool which should help me create the necessary files for each one:
[img]http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/346/helpera.jpg[/img]
and another video, if you look closely you can still spot some errors:
[YOUTUBE]gEmlxnKR9qo#[/YOUTUBE]
On this point I saw the chance to include that into 1.0 and did some stresstesting with a few selected testers. I stumbled upon a few unforseen problems which kept me busy for another couple of weeks until I came up with a proper solution.
Also kept working on the tool, I'll let the pictures do the talking :P
[img]http://i.imgur.com/s5CVW.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/HH3vL.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/VPVoI.jpg[/img]
In the end it does everything pretty much automatically, reads out the correct weapons and creates the necessary files.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/cHzLm.jpg[/img]

Finally a more or less finished version of a presentation video which I thought about releasing before we came up with the idea of the [URL="https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f380-project-reality-news/117411-project-reality-devcast-2-a.html"]devcasts[/URL].
[YOUTUBE]FEkA6YPqtxc[/YOUTUBE]
[SIZE="1"]Disclaimer: the videos are quite old and details might have changed in the meantime.[/SIZE]

I hope you enjoyed this blog and I gave you a small insight how things are getting developed.

Cheers