Grey Lotus

I haven’t updated this page in a few days, so for all those wondering how progress is going… I am still working on Fantasy Frontier.  I’ve run into a bit of a stumbling block with some of the UI issues, but on the upside I also stumbled into a simpler way to do a future planned feature that I really wanted.  I’m still working on the object toolkit right now, but I got most of the file handling routines in that one taken care of. The trickier part is still to come, in how to handle older versions, but it isn’t needed quite yet. This puts me a bit behind where I wanted to be, but I’ve done some tinkering with the other stuff, so hopefully not too far.  I’m putting it aside for tonight, but might work on it more tomorrow.

Now that I’m nearing the point I can at least start releasing screen shots, I’ve decided to start adding updates to the status and dev log here.  This whole project is being done on my free time(what little there is), so updates won’t come every day. I will try to post something at least once a week… and at my current development rate, it’s likely to be much more often than that.

Last night’s developments were the creation of the texture management class(harder than it looks) and the addition of color modulation for the textures. If I didn’t do modulation, I’d need tons of textures with different colors just for different kinds of stone or earth… even though right now there aren’t different types. Looking forward, and all. This also lets me alter the color information on some layers by season or temperature, later on. So autumn can look like autumn.

Up on the plate for this weekend is:

• Clean up and put in better error checking for the texture manager.
• Minimap creation and updating. Doing this is easy… doing it /efficiently/ so that it doesn’t impact framerate might be more tricky.
• Adjust the tile class for varying numbers of detail textures. These won’t be used much at first, but the eventual idea is that it will change the clothing colors of various entities dependent upon occupation… or later, by what clothing/armor they’re wearing. This also allows me to have, say, trees with brown trunks and green leaves. I don’t want to overdo it though… every detail layer is another layer to draw, so a lot of them would really impact framerate.
• All of the above might sound complex, but most of the supporting code is already in place, so it won’t take too long. For the rest of the time I’m going to attempt to create some better textures and get the color modulation on them correct. After that maybe I can start designing the object definition files, though I doubt that will be completely finished this weekend.