Monday 29 November 2010

Fertility factor

I made a simple routine to simulate ground plant growth. It's calculating the fertility factor for surrounding tiles and then growing a plant or if some type of growth exists it's growing it to the next stage. The result from such simple simulation is actually quite nice. Here is the situation after one iteration:






And this is the same place after ten iterations:

As you can see water gives better fertility factor in pretty much natural way. Now after this is done I can start to implement the plant object generation (these are just simple terrain tiles) on top of that. The great thing about this is that the routine can be run again and again. With large values everything will change to thick swamp, and with plant generation I'm already dreaming of forests that will be properly tuned for temperature conditions, creating jungle or cold/dry climate forest. All that without any kind of static or pre-determined routines. Just some rules for growth and iterations.

Friday 26 November 2010

Bugs of Kaduria

The current version 0.4.9 has three known open bugs:

16. When throwing item against a wall, it hits the player (z-location problem in collision detection)
13. Top area flickering when message shown
3. When in fullscreen SDL aligns all open windows to right side of screen (remove fullscreen option?)

Each of them are kind of hard to fix. Z-location problem is related to how the game sees the z-direction (depth) and it's an issue that needs either manual fixing or a big rewrite of engine to actually support third dimension (even the gameview will stay 2-dimensional). Bug #13 is annoying, but could be easy to fix. Bug #3 is SDL related and can't be fixed by me. I noticed that when I exit fullscreen every open window is moved to right side of the screen. I hope there will be new SDL version to fix that one.

The total bug count is 28 for 0.4.9. I try to fix bugs when I find them and keep the bug count low. The release version will hopefully contain zero known bugs, just as in Teemu. I think it's doable and the current situation looks quite good. The engine seems to be stable and there haven't been crashes for a long time actually.

Friday 5 November 2010

Level connections

The level connection routine is now ready. There was a confusion with connecting proper ids since stairs (or more like nodes) have their own special id unrelated to object id of stairs.

Each stairs have a sign that shows where you are now, but I think it could be useful to show where the stairs lead. Maybe even both in the same sign. There could be some variations like unclear signs or no sign at all with special stairs.