Development Update - Jan 10, 2010

Mycal

Staff member
So over the last month I haven't really had time to do anything. My work schedule got really hectic along with the excitment of "moving" into a new house. Technically I didn't move, but my sister bought the house from my parents and I just switched rooms. Anyway, having a home and not worrying about whether I'll still have this home tomorrow is a nice feeling (if you've been following any of my posts, you'll have an idea of what was going on, but life has been really scary for the past couple of years). Anyway, a new semester of classes start and unfortunately, my plans fell through for graduating this semester. I will be graduating next Fall instead, but no worries. Lighter loads allows for more time to work on my projects :D.

So what I've done over the last few weeks is not much, but I felt it was a necessary step forward. I make changes to the map format very regularly and needed a way to convert older maps to the new format extremely fast (testing is a pain if I have to go through and remake maps every time I make a small change). Regular expression in notepad++ was killing me with large changes like the recent ones I've been doing, so I made a full fledged converter for map formats. This should allow a permanent way to upgrade from any version of maps to the newest version if needed. The XML save format makes things extremely easy in this regard :D. Also with some upcoming changes to the new Odyssey engine this will make very fast work of mass converting old databases to the new one.

Secondly, I think I've finally finished some much needed work on the client. Lighting works really well now. Lightmaps are created once at runtime and then cached for fast viewing on a per map basis. And font now renders properly when the lights are rendering. Actual drawing of maps is now very fast thanks to LINQ. Finally, I've been doing some very minor tests with scripting on the client and am pretty impressed with how well Lua performs. Still haven't gotten around to the bridge testing yet. Still working out the best way to trigger changes in depth via script.

Until Krum comes back (if he does), I need some new tiles. I think I'm going to use a mixture of our tiles and some I've collected over the years. Since they are only temporary, I'm not going to worry too much about licenses. But not having real bridge tiles and missing a lot of different tiles needed for creating nice looking water is making things hard. As for sprites, maybe I'll try my hand at making something to compliment the 1 sprite (minus skin colors) we have now. I haven't done any pixel work in years, but who knows, maybe I'll make something great (not likely). I think I'll make some kind of woodland creature...wait, don't we also have a rabbit and frog? Did Krum make those? Man my memory sucks...Steven!!? Do you still have those unsorted tiles that Krum sent us? I can't find anything but my cut up versions of his tiles (currently tiles1.mgp, tiles2.mgp, and tiles3.mgp). I know I left alot out of those tilesets, maybe there is something I can use in the full version!

Sorry, brainflow on that last paragraph... :D
 

steven

Administrator
I can check, I am guessing they have to be somewhere on my computer if not in some emails. Worst case scenario if you get a nice demo flowing I bet we could pick up a pixel artist pretty easily.

EDIT I attached a rar but I could probably do a little more searching if what you need isnt in there, its basically a super old demos tiles and some more that I through in it, I will keep looking.
 

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