New game objects

Programming some missing stuff left from the change where lots of terrain tiles were transformed to game objects. I really hope it is the last big refactoring to be done. I want to get a detailed game world with lots of interaction with game objects. I think game world and exploration is more important to me than combat and improving the character, in other words the tactical area of a roguelike. Kaduria is going to be a "sandbox" style game, where you can do other things than just whack creatures.

I think a game where killing is optional could be nice. Usually you kill creatures to get experience and then become able to kill bigger monsters, but Kaduria doesn't have experience points...

Fixing bugs part 2

When fixing a bug that didn't draw walls when partially on cavern area (that dark mask on picture) a new bug appeared. As you can see corridors (green mask) don't really behave that well when trying to find a way in a round room. The reason is diagonal "corner" mask (white) which corridor routine avoids when it tries to find a straight wall (colored ones). This bug could be fixed with pathfinding I guess.

It's not unusual that fixing something creates new bugs, because of the complex relationship between different parts of the dungeon generator.

Fixing bugs

Fixed some bugs today and added new ones in the bug list. I should probably make a better list of bugs, because they aren't going away. I think I have been too condifent that re-factoring the source code is going to remove bugs like that. In fact removing bugs is re-factoring and it's maybe the best kind of re-factoring, because you create solutions that just works and not a perfect source code that is supposed to work (that rarely happens).

It's been really windy all this day. It's not usual in this part of world. Like what the heck is going on? To make it more annoying our rooftop is loose and it's banging against the roof all the fucking time.

This day sucked at work, too. I was given a job as an officer to EU election (some lucky bastards get elected to EU parliament and get like shitload of salary). EU is shit, it's going to fall down in couple of years. So, there I'm sitting on a chair for FOUR hours and waiting for people to come and vote for those bastards. The pre-election lasts a week and I have four days, each having 4 painfully long hours left.

If that is not enough my prostate is killing me. It's been bad since last christmas and this is no joke. When it's going chronic you just have to take it like a man. I should go to doctor, but I'm not sure they can do anything.

Fuck that wind. Fuck you, wind!

Kaduria 0.4.6

0.4.6 was the last released version. I remember it now, because I found all release versions from old computer. I was amazed how playable that version was. Everything seemed to be fine, but I remember how stuck I was at that moment. The dungeon generator was hard coded for one level theme, which basically had almost all features mixed together.

It was somewhat painful to notice that it had more playable content than the current version.

Level class refactoring

I'm browsing through the Level class and trying to clean it, plus programming some missing things at the same time. It's quite an overwhelming task, because Level is a huge class. When I separated ground objects from terrain tiles (they became actual objects) the change was bigger than I first thought so that's basically what needs to be refactored in Level.

Action

I need some planning with actions. First I have to think how actions are broken down to atomic pieces for both player and monsters and what data actions need. The AI for actions is going to be really tough stuff. I don't have experience with sophisticated AI and it's first time I'm trying to do that. I have a vague idea how it's going to work, because I have thought AI issues a lot during the development.

The new Avatar

I'm refactoring the player class and also U_Npc, the base class for monsters and the player. It's now getting slightly interesting, because I'm restoring the actions which the player (and monsters) have in the game world. They caused some serious problems before, because I wasn't really good at figuring out where actions should take place. Even I knew monsters share some actions I didn't (for some strange reason) place them in the base class.

Writing the code for actions is I think the hardest part in roguelike project. You know, those innocent looking commands like eat, look and search. They rely so much on the engine core, that if the engine is broken then the commands can't work, or they require constant refactoring to match the changes in the engine. Of course, writing modular code is a good way to prevent such problems, but I really didn't know how to do that until now.