Saving and Loading games! After the events of the Early Access launch of Ultimate ADOM, which had some negative impact by the lack of being able to save your game (the dev team had some trouble with it due mainly to the complexity of the data model and the lack of proper tools for serialization in C#), I decided to jump into it and finish it. Stoneshard, for all the good reception it has had, could have even better ratings if it weren’t for similar problems.
We had worked a bit on it in the past but were always pushing its completion until the model was more defined, and now that we have a clear idea of what the game is going to be about, it was about time to finally do it. I charged into it and we now have a fully working save/load flow! it will require a lot of testing to make sure the model is preserved correctly, but the core of it is working and any changes will hopefully be small.
It was not simple, since we didn’t have the persistence model in mind since the beginning, so it required moving a lot of stuff around to make sure the logical world model was separated from the visual game objects and other static references.
Continued working with polish on the visuals, I decided to create a separate “playground” scene, mimicking and using the same lighting setup as the main one, so that the visual artist could play around there, placing objects and seeing them as they are seen in the main game including the post-processing profile settings and the scene lights. This included adding some controls to the scene to change the time of the day, emulate the exploration distance, as well as the changes in camera temperature caused by rain. We are still working on tuning the lighting and colors.
Finally, we made some changes in the units, with the Guardians now wearing a club instead of a spear, and the explorer now attacking with a knife. We also added new icons for the “blessings”, replacing the orb placeholders with some Muisca “runes”, and started the transition to the new inventory UI.