i know I missed the Christmas deadline, but I hope I can make up for it this week by pushing a much more finished update, and I have high confidence it can happen before the new year.
The theme of this week as I started was ramps. Everything was focused on making ramps up and down the levels, where they should go, where they shouldn't go, how they should look, and so on. And it began to work.
No structures generated in this case because of a bug. Fixing the bug led to some unintended consequences, as can be seen below.
As the week wore on, it became more and more apparent that this wasn't the way to go, since the cave system was naturally more dense in different places. This created a diffusion of caves as the layer increased, until it reached an approximate equilibrium. That wouldn't be so much of a problem but the equilibrium was not dense enough.
This is what the industry would call "a major problem"
By the close of the week, I decided that ramps were the worst idea I had in the new version; having to descend levels by going through dungeons makes more sense anyway, and it turns things like a standard fetch quest into a long and challenging ordeal of exploration and danger. A secondary reason was that it makes the cave system more compact and consistent, because the cave system could be generated initially and the lairs added later on, as opposed to the previous way I was doing things.
This composite image shows the layers in progression. Notice how the lair doesn't always touch the cave system on each level, to produce interesting navigation.
For the next version, I actually have to hook up the lairs appropriately and add stairs back in (because they were removed when the lairs were brought into the new paradigm), add the towns back in, and elegantly wrap up the tiles which were formerly ramps down. I don't anticipate it taking too long, but you never know. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.