Well it turns out the last day or so has not been as eventful as planned. An extended meeting at the bank (in a good way ;), don’t worry) and other errands kept my wife and I busy for a few hours. Meaning, namely, that the only work I got to do in the past two days occured yesterday. Since I didn’t blog then, at least I have something to talk about.
Yesterday was spent mainly on creating my midterm report, with a bit of “XML-work” tossed in there. I can’t spoil anything on the midterm report, as it will be public soon. I will say though, working on my “trendy” Apple Macintosh Computron certainly produced an excellent formatted and beautiful report. Unfortunately I will have to spend some time retooling the report to be just as beautiful in OpenOffice to get an ODF file (but maybe ezod can “spec”ify my document either way!? who knows.)
As for XML fun, I’ve created a work-in-progress (WIP) branch so I can unobstructively include the necessary TinyXML++ source files into my module directory. As well I’ve created a helper file that will house the actual map import functionality, cutting quite a bit of code OUT of the Risk class file (giving it a needed clean up.) I will try and encapsulate a lot of the worker map functions (like createStarSystem, etc) into the same map import file. I’ll be creating a server option to enable or disable XML map imports tomorrow so I can merge my WIP branch in and not make the ruleset unplayable; Until map imports work I can have the default config’s not use map files, and once XML imports work, then I can eliminate the option!
Thats all for now! Oh, by the way, if anyone reading this does any small time stock trading please let me know, I wouldn’t mind some advice 
Mithro | 11-Jul-08 at 12:23 am | Permalink
You could do something as simple as using a SVG file. With the following mapping,
Circles == Systems
Lines == Links
Colors == Continents
Then it becomes pretty trivial to draw a map in something like inkscape.