Grey Lotus » Fantasy Frontier

Entity Creation

Alamar — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 06:25:15 +0000

Good news tonight. I managed to get some simple entity classes up and import, along with a definition. My art is terrible, but fortunately I haven’t written the code for tiles to display entities yet, so no need to see it! The code correctly creates and spawns entities at the edge of the map, with an inefficient but effective anti-collision algorithm. For the first time in quite a while I feel close to something releasable.

Entity classes

Alamar — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:05:12 +0000

I haven’t posted in this category for a while because I haven’t made too much progress. I’ve had to step back from coding due to running into an efficiency problem in handling the Entity classes, and I’ve been working on ways around it. I think I have a workable, if not ideal solution, so I’ll probably tinker with the code this weekend some more. I doubt it will get finished this weekend, though.

State of the Game

Alamar — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:43:42 +0000

I was away from internet this past weekend, so I didn’t get to update then. On the upside, I took my laptop with me and did a little work. The new object model is in, and it’s much much simpler and more moddable. I think I cut down the number of lines of code significantly. Also implemented a logging function so that I can track bugs more easily.

In case you haven’t guessed, the last two months have been ‘busy’ as in ‘hellish.’

Werk

Alamar — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:52:35 +0000

It’s still crazy here, both with work on my ‘real job’ and my grandfather, who is in the hospital. Guess is he won’t last the week, so don’t expect regular development for another few weeks.

I freely admit that my new computer and a ton of Sword of the Stars may be contributing to this slowness.

However! Lest I lose sight of my goal completely, I endeavored to do a little work on Fantasy Frontier again. Mostly, I rewrote some loading code and wrote some config file classes, eliminating my need for a third party library that was giving me linker headaches. Progress, right?

Terrain Generation

Alamar — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:41:54 +0000

Well that was a pain.

If you’re wondering why it took so long to do terrain generation, it’s because I had to rewrite the entire section about four times. A lot of algorithms look fine on paper, but in practice they don’t do so well for making a good landscape. I’m still not 100% happy with the way it does things, but it’s close enough that I can use what I have and move on, to tweak it later. This is especially true once I change some of the constants to config parameters so I won’t need to recompile. Since I don’t have overworld or biome generation done(and might not this release at all), I’ll probably use a specification text file for the first alpha release.

Next week’s tasks will be minor things like rearranging the UI and adding various progress bars, maybe time progression. Fairly simple tasks. After that comes the entity stuff, and that will be more difficult.

Restarting Development

Alamar — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:32:37 +0000

Thanks to a number of distractions(including another project which I, suprisingly, have finished now), I set Fantasy Frontier aside for a while. Guess I’d started to get burnt out, considering I code for my day job as well. 12 hours a day of coding, 6 days a week, isn’t very healthy.

Now I’ve picked it up again, and last night went over the code I’d already done to refamiliarize myself. I then threw myself into working on the map terrain generation code, and got it… somewhat working. The framework is there, but the actual algorithm is still being tweaked. Plus, I don’t have a lot of terrains in my data file yet. It was a good chance to test the object editor as well, and it passed acceptably. It’s not quite as stable as I’d like, but for now it works.

Once I have a few different terrains working and tiling, I think I’ll dress up the UI a tiny bit and post a few screenshots, so you all know I’m working.

Case of the Mondays

Alamar — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:32 +0000

Yeah, not as much progress as I’d like this past week… but when is there? At least I got something done. It will probably be pretty boring for a while, concerning Fantasy Frontier at least. The part of the code I’m working on is interesting from an algorithmic perspective, but not so interesting to people who’d actually play the game. I can say I’d like to get farming working as soon as possible, but it’s still a long way out. Development might also be slow because I’m going to be having a pretty rough week or two at work, so I might not feel too good about going home to code after a full day of code at work.

In the meantime, I’m considering writing some more posts in the RPG sections, specifically a more in-depth critique of D&D 4e. It’s been out a year now, I think I can write something without being swarmed too badly by people reflexively hating the new edition.

Weekly Update

Alamar — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:49:21 +0000

This week I had to back off from development to handle some financial matters and housework that needed done. I’ve done some paper outlines of some of the things I want to do with future versions, but nothing solid on the dev front. Work will resume sometime this upcoming week, starting with some terrain generation.

Object Editor Functional

Alamar — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:42:57 +0000

After a few missteps and a lot of delays, I’m marking the object editor as complete. It isn’t actually finished entirely… there are a lot of UI tweaks I could be doing, and a few minor bugs, but it does edit the files and objects correctly. So it’s functioning and I can move on to other things, and just tweak it as needed. That’s one major step out of the way, since the file processing routines in the toolkit are the exact same as the ones I’ll be using in the actual game.

The UI evolves

Alamar — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:56:38 +0000

As it turns out, I did work a lot on this today. More than I’d thought. The UI for the modding toolkit is mostly done, I just have to link up a few more signals, add some exception handling in here and there, and then refine the actual subclass for the only editable object. This involves writing a small OpenGL widget for the preview pane, but I don’t expect any trouble from that one. So, a few more days on that, and then I can move on to more interesting things like terrain generation and AI modules. I’ll post a screenshot as soon as I have something that looks decent, I promise!