I got a lot of stuff done this week, and made some good progress towards the tech test. To answer the question: can I get an MVP for the next version out before Christmas? I don't really know! It's about 50-50 right now, and dependent on time and stuff.
The first thing I knocked out was getting stores back in towns and getting them up and running. It was a pretty quick fix and a good thing to lead off with.
Same functionality as before. Sorry, no discounts.
I then elected to knock out some generation tasks. The planning phase which happened a few weeks ago was put into practice and everything worked really well, and the caves looked pretty natural.
An example of a branching tunnel... and a choice to be made.
I had already intended to do some work with the minimap, which really needed an update, but my primary motive here was to get a clean, concise birds-eye view of the cave system. And my initial instincts for cave generation turned out to create a spaghetti-like morass of tunnels which was WAY too dense, allowing players to easily take alternative paths to areas.
The extremely dense tunnel system.
The culprit: allowing tunnels to intersect to a small degree. Once I prohibited this, things looked quite a bit better.
A less dense but still not perfect tunnel system.
The generation works by keeping track where the ends of the tunnels are, and generating there. However, since this would make a mostly-linear or branching cave, and I wanted a cyclic cave (a cave with closed loops), I also added a few more ways it can generate, leading to a much more balanced and realistic cave.
Notice the arrow sections, which will one day create passageways to new depths of the cave.
Below is a diagram of the results which highlights a key feature I was intending to have in the generation. If the player wants to get between two particular towns, there are a few routes. The pink/red one takes him directly through a monster lair, which would be relatively dangerous, but might be necessary given certain constraints. In contrast the pink/blue path is far longer but far safer.
While this effect isn't universal, it is more prevalent towards the edge of the map.
The tech test itself was a total success, and I'm 99% sure I'll move forward in this direction. The program uses roughly the same amount of memory as it did, and while the file sizes were seven times larger, they still are very manageable (115 KB) and not a concern.
Satisfied with generation for now, I turned to restoring some functionality to the lairs, since the paradigm shifted out from under them. Generation is back to working, and I'm working on restoring encounter and combat functionality.
Already strongly resembling what once was.
I'll obviously return to a lot of things in the future, but I'll try to force out this update before Christmas, which give me two more days to work on this. We shall see...
Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.