Back To It

Spent a couple of weeks away from code. Was ill for a little while, then went away for a while, far from keyboards and screens. Very relaxing.

Next things on my list for this thing:

1) Add multiple textures so I can add indicators to the terrain and use gradient filtering to allow for less crude discontinuity between cells.
2) Modify cell rendering info passed through from the lua so scripts can control the output more.
3) Add resource points to the database and add info to the map to show them.

Another thing I'm vaguely working on is a libtcod-based roguelike based on my tabletop Tales and Fables campaign.

Android build

Got the Android build working today. This is particularly important as I wanted to confirm that the scripting worked at a reasonable speed on mobile and lo, it does. Here's a screenshot. (The update button is in a weird place,  I know.)

Hex Terrain Pics

It's very crude right now, but here's my hexagonal terrain system at work.

The current script creates a 20x20 randomised-height map with random cell state selections from (dark green woodland, light green grassland, brownish scrubland, grey shale). Then, when update is clicked I run a cellular automaton with mods for things like grass growing better near forests, everything growing badly on heavy slopes etc. Finally I run it twice for each update (to avoid the tick-tock cycling problems that make cellular automata look a bit weird and unnatural). All done in lua, then rendered by Irrlicht from the lua registry I made for Jump Point.

This is one result after 6 iterations (3 clicks of "update").

(Font and "FPS Touch Bar" controls are from the ProtonSDK demos, as usual.)

The grey areas are basically dips in the ground. Once I make regions blend into one another and make the height something a bit smoother than Math.random(-4, +4), the transitions should look rather a lot better.

I should note that the "This Is A Label" and Update button were both also added from script.

Next up - a slider bar for rainfall (which will involve adding slider bars to the GUI scripting) and add in tree rendering for the "forest" tiles.

I should probably mention I still have no idea what kind of game I'm going to make with this. It's still mostly just an experiment/toy :)

Definite Progress

Update scripts work now, although I don't really like the results very much. Gonna do some more thinking about exactly how to make it work and possibly make more data available to the decision scripts.

One thing I'm noticing is that lua is disturbingly slow in Debug mode. Possibly stripping some of my debug output will help, and of course Release is a very different beast which I will have to check out shortly. OTOH if it remains slow I'm going to have to seriously reconsider this whole design.

I've also managed to get collision-to-terrain working but it's a resource hog and slides irritatingly. Since the thing doesn't really have many collision objects, I might just do conform-to-surface instead. Also - picking! (Haven't hooked it to anything yet though.)

So, a little bit of progress on my hexagonal terrain system. The dynamic updating is written, although it doesn't yet work properly. Managed to make the whole thing work with a minimum of branching (although there are limits to what I can do with a max function, really).

Might post up some pics or a video when it's working properly.

Late Night Coding

It's a dangerous habit to say the least.

I've found myself sitting down after Cerys has gone to bed, telling myself "I'll just put in an hour or so, debug that thing I've been thinking about, then I'll go to bed." Put some music on, open up my IDE...

Then suddenly it's 7:30AM and I'm volunteering to take Cessie's place on the school run as I am, after all, still awake.

And once again it looks like this might be one of those nights. Still, it's doing wonders for my state of mind. It's sort of amazing how much happier I am when I'm able to code. 3 years of illness has made me really cherish the periods when flow is remotely possible.

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Can't promise regular future updates, but I've spent some of tonight's candle-burning idiocy on sorting out my various accounts for things so who knows? I have projects I'd like to talk about and projects I'd rather not talk about, so maybe I'll put something together about the former and leave the latter until 10 minutes before release :)