So I have been doing a lot of work on cleaning things up and making it easier for content to go in (new building looks soon yay). This however means I broke a bunch of things and that I did a lot of work without really gaining any new features. The current issue that i’m [...]
Ok so I took a break to spend the time thinking about what and how I should continue to approach this game. Ideally the end result of all this work is going to be a cross between a steampunk zelda, and dwarf fortress, but anything close to those are not really feasible at this point. [...]
So farms now have npcs plowing fields in preparation for plants being plantable. I also started work on redoing the camera/targeting system for ranged weapons. Previously targeting npcs with ranged weapons was horrible in that you could only shoot on the same level, and it you could only turn with the keyboard so I started [...]
So I started reworking NPCs so that it’s easier to work with them and get them to do things. Most Jobs and activities that an npc can do are pretty common among things, they may persue a creature at X distance, move to location X and do Y, move voxel X to location Y etc… [...]
March 27, 2012 in Buildings
So I have been doing a lot of work on cleaning things up and making it easier for content to go in (new building looks soon yay). This however means I broke a bunch of things and that I did a lot of work without really gaining any new features. The current issue that i’m working to tackle is the fact that when you build even a small village about 30 or so NPCs the game starts to slow down dropping fps down to 15-40 which shouldn’t happen with so few NPCs.
March 21, 2012 in Buildings
Ok so I took a break to spend the time thinking about what and how I should continue to approach this game. Ideally the end result of all this work is going to be a cross between a steampunk zelda, and dwarf fortress, but anything close to those are not really feasible at this point. So I have spent some time and gathered a bunch of ideas and decided that i’m going to build out features to build a first small mini game. This mini game is going to be a town defense of sorts. The game will be broken down into a couple of phases for play and features. My main reason for doing this is because iterations are very important when making software [...]
March 13, 2012 in Uncategorized
So farms now have npcs plowing fields in preparation for plants being plantable. I also started work on redoing the camera/targeting system for ranged weapons. Previously targeting npcs with ranged weapons was horrible in that you could only shoot on the same level, and it you could only turn with the keyboard so I started working on making the camera work more like a third person shooter like mass effect or global agenda. The camera currently works along the X axis and i’m working on figuring out how to make it work on the Y axis.
March 11, 2012 in NPCs
So I started reworking NPCs so that it’s easier to work with them and get them to do things. Most Jobs and activities that an npc can do are pretty common among things, they may persue a creature at X distance, move to location X and do Y, move voxel X to location Y etc… etc… so instead of repeating this logic per job I’ve created a task system. For example a farm building will keep track of it’s farm field and may send an npc on a task of Travel to field location A, and Till the land. This actually makes it really easy to create complex tasks while leaving it in a reusable state. For the more complex tasks I have a task [...]
March 8, 2012 in Procedural Generation
So I redid a large chunk of the underlying chunk/voxel code to get some higher levels of performance from it while making it easier for systems like the buildings/blueprints to interact with it. The improvements make it easy to see a distance of 40 chunks away, or about 20 minecraft chunks away. This is about double the size of minecraft’s viewing distance, and with a couple more tweaks (need more time) I should be able to easily double this distance again. The only problem I ran into while doing this, is I noticed just how unrealistic it is to have the tree generator as part of the terrain generator, because trees overlap on different chunks while being “spawned” from one it makes it hard to [...]
March 7, 2012 in Uncategorized
So I continue to work on the farms, and redoing buildings so that it’s easier to add new types of buildings in the future. A lot of the work being done is making it so that the specialized code for farming can easily be changed, and can allow for many different farm blueprints. I also want to make sure that the farm code is modular and doesn’t interfere with the other building code (which was kinda lumped together right now because I just wanted to get the feature in). I also started redoing the chunk and rendering code to make it more efficient, and easier to develop on. Right now there are a lot of places where I interact with the underlying array of a [...]
March 6, 2012 in Gameplay
So I didn’t get much done today because I went out with friends and played some settlers of catan. Anyways the newest work is on adding another building and some of the supporting features of it, this feature would be farms. Farms require quite a bit more work than the previous buildings because I have to introduce plants, and I have to add voxel tilling/watering to the game. Besides working on farms I started a simple little Simplex Noise visualizer that I will be using to demonstrate some of the things that you can do with simplex noise, and also as a working example of code so that people can have an easy tool to play around with them selves.
March 5, 2012 in Buildings
So I didn’t get any work done on new features, but I did clean up a large amount of code, however there is still plenty of cleanup left to do. I do however like to provide new screen shots every time I post so I give you buildings, with NPCs in the forest terrain instead of the flat terrain. Also in looking at the search queries that lead people do this blog I noticed that most people come here looking for information on Perlin Simplex Noise so I have started work on a piece better explaining it that I hope to get up this weekend.
March 4, 2012 in Buildings
So this weekend I did a lot of work on adding towns to the V3 engine. The reason for the lack of updates this weekend is also the townships, this was a HUGE change. This change added about 20% more code to the game (though it’s still quite messy and needs to be cleaned up). It also added about 10 more classes so far. Anyways townships consist of buildings, and these buildings have storage areas for resources, which the NPCs of that town can use. This means that a mine (pyramid shaped thing right now) will produce stone blocks, and the Masonry (cube shaped building) will have stone hauled from the mine to it’s storage area where it can use the stone to make things. [...]
March 1, 2012 in Buildings
Most of the stuff I did today is behind the scenes work so don’t have much to show. Got the blueprint menu connected up with the player so now the player can select which blueprint he wants to use and the voxel building will be output. The buildings right now suck as I still haven’t bothered to build real decent looking buildings. I also started working on the foundation of towns but there is nothing visual about this yet.
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