19 – Not dead

Good news everybody. I am not dead and neither is this project. The huge break in posting is due to me having a busy period right now. It is December and in December you spend half the month on holyday and the other half preparing to go on holyday. Also, there was a launch of a high profile game that I am not going to name here that had occupied a lot of my free time.

But the main reason for having a hard time getting work done on the project is that I’ve gotten stuck on the scheduler. In the beginning it was simple but it got very complicated. I could stop here and formulate the entire task in a formal language so you can see how complicated this was, but that would take a lot of space and I am way behind. Enough to say that I hate it when a game is perfectly fine, but it has some serious but not game breaking flaws. A lot of games have camera problems for example. Why did not the developers fix it? More often than not the answer is that it was very hard. There is not a fixed formula that you can apply and have a perfect game camera that never obstructs your view. Making it perfect would require maybe huge resources. But still, I’ll have a perfect scheduler and I am getting close.

So now let us talk about the new features that were almost done at the beginning of December, but yada yada yada things written above.

So workshops? Yes! Quite a few of them:

Selecting a building type will result in a marking on your map. Here your building will be built. As with stockpiles, these markers are not physical objects. They are just something to help you in the game:

After that, a single dwarf will go and build the workshop tile by tile. While the process is animated and scheduled fully, the resulting building is underwhelming:

In the future you will be able to tell all building apart. Right now only the frame is placed. As this will be only a cosmetic feature, I will not rush to implement it.

This is all I promised for next post last time, but luckily I have more given the huge break. Now, when harvesting plants they will appear on the map in a small sack. These sacks are free. Just consider that your dwarves love sacks and brought 3000 of them on this expedition:

Creating food stockpiles will result in your dwarves hauling them there, like they do with logs, only this time their movement speed will not be affected. Logs are big and heavy, but a sack of food is not that much for a sturdy dwarf. Here they’ll combine the content of sacks so they take up less place and left over empty sacks will magically disappear only to reappear when needed. Here you can se the dwarves as they haul food and fill the stockpile: 

So let us say this is two posts worth of features? Not really…

Luckily, I have one more: map saving and loading. This is way over due. Now I can continue to develop the same map and I am not forced to start from scratch each time. It is maybe a little bit buggy, but I’ll fix it. Saved maps are huge, almost 3 MiB, so I use Z compression to get them down to a few KiB.

And there was also the last round of rendering speed improvements. This is it. Things can’t get any faster than this. The only way is to draw less. I have some ideas about “hallowing” out the map, ideas that could lead nicely to a future 3D engine.

For the rest of December, I am not going to have so much time, but I’ll still squeeze out a post or two. But in January everything should get back to normal.

Statistics S45:

DHCore:  1875 lines / 44.8 KiB / 11 files

DH:  2533 lines / 63.8 KiB / 13 files

DHEditor: 612 lines / 16.1 KiB / 13 files

Total: 5020 lines / 127.4 / 37 files