VectorStorm Blog

It’s been a while since I posted a screenshot, so I figured that it was about time to do one again.  You all probably remember that gazebo-style “starting area” that I set up to test the procedural building generation code.

Well, here’s that same pagoda building, except this time it’s not being built inside a square plot of land;  instead, it’s being built inside a plot of land that’s shaped like a six-spoked gear.

I’m rather pleased at how well it’s coped with the strange, concave shape!

Still need to add some smarts to avoid having multiple overlapping pillars, though.  Shouldn’t be too hard to do!  (But not for milestone one;  must keep focus!)

I keep forgetting how much of a time-sink UI coding can be.

Lately, I’ve been working on the GUI for MMORPG Tycoon 2.  I still haven’t started on a visual pass for it;  instead, I’ve been working on its structure.  One big change I’ve made recently is to give the player a different action bar when on the grid than when he’s in the game world;  he gets terrain-shaping tools while on the grid, and game-world-effecting tools while in the game world.

Or to put that differently, if you want to make a mountain, you need to be on the grid.  If you want to build a tavern, you need to be in the game world.

I’ve stripped the “Road” button out of the general “Build” toolbar, and put it into its own “Roads” toolbar.  This is to make room for more types of roads (different sizes, bridges, and eventually maybe even tunnels).  I’ve also stripped the “QuestGiver” button out of the Build toolbar, and moved it into a new NPCs toolbar, where it will eventually be joined by a few other types of NPCs.

Speaking of which, actually providing a real model for characters in the MMORPG world is rapidly becoming more important.  But I’m going to try to put it off until after my first milestone.

I’ve also spent some time designing how the player will place these objects within the MMORPG world.  I like the simplicity of being able to place an object, and then having it be fixed in place;  moving it not being an option.  However, with the current interface, the player can’t really see precisely how the object is going to be situated within the world, so it feels a little unpredictable.  I might need to expose the “Move” interface again, to allow the player to tweak the position of his buildings.  I’d also like to allow him to rotate them..  that’s not an issue right now because I haven’t spent any time on actually building nice-looking structures, but once I’ve done that, it’s going to be really awkward if every building is always facing the same direction.

Next step is building a GUI for manually setting up quests.  I was going to do combat engine v2.0 first, but discovered that it’s really annoying to go test combat when the random quest generation can end up putting all the monsters an extremely awkward distance away from anywhere useful, so the GUI work is going to come first.  Once that’s done, I’ll start on the revised combat engine.

It’s always disappointing to do a lot of work, only to have to undo it again.

I’ve spent the past few hours working on modifying MMORPG Tycoon 2 to keep just one copy of each building model in memory.  At the moment, each respawn point that you place (for example) stores its own copy of the respawn point model.  This means that memory grows rather a lot, as you place more and more respawn points.  The standard solution to this situation is to load the model just once, and then to draw the single model in lots of different places in the world.

In practice, though, actually making that happen can be a little tricky.  I’d gone a fair way toward implementing it, before finally realising that the way I was doing it was ugly and difficult;  it was going to be a nightmare in the long run.  I certainly learned some things from doing it, but it’s always a bit disappointing to end a session of coding by undoing all your changes, and putting things back the way they were before you’d started.

At least I do now have a path forward, and I’ll make a little progress along this new direction before it’s time to sleep.  But I would have liked to have some visible results tonight, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.

Oh well.

Lots of behind-the-scenes work.  I’ve got terrain properly generating and regenerating as you move around the world, now.  I’ve also switched back from the “painting the terrain” system seen in videos before, to a system based upon placements.. with the placements then automatically performing the same terrain painting from those videos.  This approach fits in better with the game economy, makes save game file sizes manageable again, and helps push the game’s emphasis away from crafting terrain, and back toward the areas where I really want the player to be focusing his time.

In the screenshot here, I have a “terrain spire” selected (though it’s still rendering just a block).  The rough circles surrounding it are showing its area of influence;  this terrain object is making mountains;  you get full-strength mountains within the inner circle, and the effect fades off toward the outer circle.  (If you were to look from above, both circles would be perfectly circular;  following the terrain surface makes the inner circle quite wobbly!)

Continue reading “Latest stuff”

Stills don’t really do it justice, so a short video.