Well, work this week has been on diversifying regional biomes. Which is a lot of legwork, actually. Unfortunately I have no screenshots to show you, yet, but I’ll be posting some as soon as they’re ready.
Worldgen has undergone yet another revision, this time to sharpen up the landmasses, change the color palette to something more realistic (I spent some time studying satellite imagery), and generally make things more interesting to look at and explore. This has been facilitated by the fact that I can now actually wander around the world map in-game.
I believe I’ll also start working on a ‘Development Roadmap’ section for the blog this week. Because of the nature of my personality I am unlikely to stick to an extremely rigorous or predetermined development path; I’m too obsessive over details to not constantly make changes to preexisting sections of code if I think I can improve them. On the other hand it would be nice to have some kind of general guide, and it’ll probably also help those of you who are following progress on the game to understand the order that I’ll be trying to add things to the player experience. Hopefully.
Pretty soon I’ll be posting a video or two; these ones will presumably be a lot more in-depth and media-rich than the short clips I’ve posted so far. They’ll mainly be practice for a potential Kickstarter project in the future, since the last time I tried putting something together for one I walked away realizing I needed a lot more practice in the video-producing department. With any luck I’ll receive enough input from the blog and the kind folks over at the Bay12 forums to put something vaguely presentable together!
That looks awesome! I’m glad that even though you changed the colors, you kept the overall look of the shallow water / coastline colors. I always thought they look really good. Looking forward to a more in-depth video
What kind of system are you running this on? In some of the videos things are nice and smooth in others a little choppy (drawing the beaches). Just wondering what type of load your putting on things with all the many, many layers you have going on.
It’s running on my quad-core desktop in those videos; however, I’ve tested the newest version on my dual-core (older) laptop and it works pretty well. It’s multi-threaded, so most of the lag is minor if it’s run on a desktop.
The vast majority of lag in those videos is due to me running FRAPS in the background. It sucks up a ton of resources and slows my whole desktop down.
I’m about to post a new video, though. Hopefully it will be *somewhat* more representative of normal running speed, although since FRAPS is still recording in the background, it’s not going to be perfect.
I should also mention that in the latest builds I’ve included the psyco module, which speeds things up quite a lot. So much so that I had to slow down the title splash screen because it was too spastic.
nice! I look forward to your next video.