Week Without a Post?

Could I leave you, my darlings, without a post for a whole week?... No, of course I couldn't.

So what is going on?... Well, I'm trying to arrange a Friday night D&D game with a group of mates - but two of them are being quiet on the availability, one doesn't have a webcam or mic to join in with, one is eager and I'm getting blue balls about the whole affair.

I've been playing some games, notably Cities Skylines, and I've been made to play a lot of H1Z1 Battle Royale for the wife, our best result has been #2 so far, so near, and yet so far from a win!

Today see's the release of WarThunder patch 1.70, their 1945 release, and it's biggest item for me is the new British Naval Aviation line, which I'll look forward to unlocking and getting to ace status.

Beyond all that, I think we're going to be busy Saturday, the father-in-law is having his boat launched (seriously, a whole boat) so we've got to go to that.  Then Sunday we're meant to be going to see some friends, but I don't know what that'll entail.  If I can throw together a D&D game and their kids are in the mood I'll drag that with me and make them play.

Development wise for the Dungeon Crawler, I've been tidying up some of the C++ code under the hood, and I've formally sorted out the XML loaders, so that's the format for everything, settings and screen layout will be the next feature I look at.  Doors are still a work in progress, and I'm still mulling the whole steps thing...

Beard Gate

I'm beginning to process the interactions I've had over the last week, with the grief and trying to keep busy I've shluft off a lot of stuff and am only now processing it... One item on the list was I had to collect one of the poodles from the clippers...

The lady who does the clipping, I've known her since 1989... So boy, teen and man... in 1994 I grew a beard...

So, 21 years... I've had a beard for 21 years....

She looked at me when I collected the dog the other day and said...

"Oh you're not growing a beard are you"

Go figure... Go figure.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL - Loading Maps

Very quick update, I've been taking the XML Maps from the Editor in it's current form and loading them into the actual game now, this has required a change of several subsystems inside the Grid/Map loading code.

The most important change has been caching one copy of each image, so minimising memory use, and then customising them at a surface level to add walls, drawing all this once and then just rendering the one single image we hold in RAM, whilst the rest of the images can be dropped out of memory to again free more resources.

Anyway, here's a screen shot of the game (background left) with the map editor open showing the map in design.

Path finding of course routes around the walls, and tiles can be toggles as blocking or not, opening up the ability now to add doors or even hidden/false/magic doors.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL/C# - Map Editor Updates

So, the Map Editor, I made a brief mention of progress on Tuesday's post, but I've refined a few things, and I'm ready to show you some screenshots of how things look...

Here we see a tile set being imported, and placed down, then I've laid a set of dividers, a divider is a none-crossable wall like structure, but it lets us use a single square as a wall, rather than using a blank gap.

So, hopefully you can see that we can enclose spaces without so much blank black squares.

Which then leads to more complex structures:

The next item I'm literally coding now is a door, which will go into places as highlighted in red here...

Supporting single spans, or double spans...

And of course, once all this is designed into the map editor it's going to be ported into the game itself to give us the basics of the Adventure loading & walk through.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL/C# - Representing Stairs Challenge

So, the game, at the moment is totally top down 2D, there are no camera angles, no isometric perspective, it's just all looking straight down at the canvas below.

So, one challenge is how to represent depth, I've seen some art styles showing walls rising from an edge of a square and away to the centre, so it looks as though it's a wall climbing up towards the camera.

And, this effect is built in, not by the game, but by loading the pictures/images from disk, so anyone can draw like that.

One thing I can't do however is I can't draw, not very well, not on a computer.

And the next challenge facing me is how to represent stairs, if I can't do it easily with a single tile, do I need to make stairs which take up several tiles and have isometric effects to them, or do I need to increase the size of the tiles?

You see, there are options, which work to represent top down stairs...

That looks right to me, but it's done with shadows, alpha and importantly to work it all needs more than 70x70 resolution...  The same trick for me, using gradient brushes, at 70x70 comes out like this:

It's not the same is it?... No, I didn't think so.

Other options are to make stairs as I would with a biro on a table top map:

But, again this needs more pixels per tile, and definitely needs more than one tile.

Stairs going down are also a challenge, they need just as good a resolution which my tiles don't provide:

From http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=22407

Suggestions on a postcard please.

General Blog - Dungeon Map Editor & The Day Job Office

At home I'm working on fleshing out the Dungeon Map editor, so there's more information coming on that later... To whet your appetites however, I have implemented:

* Solid Tiles

* Total Empty Void Space

* Dividing Walls

* Doors in single tile

* Doors over multiple tiles

* Trap doors (drops)

And in the works on the editor are:

* Stairs Up

* Stairs Down

* Portals

These latter three items however, all require a change to how I structure the Adventure....

So, an adventure now is going to be multiple maps, each map being a layer, and you can portal from one place on one map/layer, up to another map/layer (or down).

Stairs are the same, but you enter the map at the position it's placed directly above the stair (or below).

However, none of this is why I'm blogging today, I'm blogging because I just left the day job, and before I get in the car I thought I needed to point this out...

The company I work for is multi-million Euro turn over, it's huge... The building I work in has had major infrastructure upgrades, notably a fresh air circulation system and about £35,000 worth of new air conditioning and then brand new energy efficient triple glazing....

So, the new glazing keeps the heat in... The Air circulation system is never on, and the air-con is on warm....

I have had to turn a fan on today!

It's ridiculous, the guys in charge of the A/C controls sit in an area of the building which is taller than here, so it's more airy, they don't have the sunlight falling on their windows, and they're old - so they're always cold...

The rest of us, in the blazing sun box end of the building, just sit and gently sweat...

I've pointed out before that this end of the building smells like the inside of a training shoe, and they turned the air cycling system on, and it became so fresh, so light and a great place to work... But then they insist on keeping this system off!

It is annoying beyond irritation, beyond moaning, it's just endemic stupidity, and lack of understanding of people... Very much the "I'm all right Jack" attitude prevails.

It's been so warm, I've taken to rolling a glass of water from the cooler on my arms... and I'm only sat here in a cotton shirt!  Gah.

The atmosphere, the temperature, would have to be the second thing I decided on if I ran my own software shop/office somewhere.  The first being what desks, PC's, keyboards, Screens etc the peeps used.... Before I worried about the coffee machine, it'd be air conditioning and proper fresh air, not recycling the same stale air through a wall mounted unit on a circuit.

Blog Views

We're in a unique position of two first, today is the first day my Blog has Russia as the top source of viewers (hello Russia - you strange lot you)... And also the first time the United Arab Emirates has featured on my top view count list...