22 – Happy New Year!

Have a great new year! I sure plan to.

Here we are in January 2011, a fresh new year. So it is time to leave the not very productive December behind and let the keyboard roll. Or burn.  Still, I managed to get to a computer in some lazy afternoons and work just a little bit. Here is a sorry excuse of a main menu, but it works fine as a proof of concept:

I also worked a little on implementing animals. In an exercise of futility, I also added support for animations. Since I still don’t have my own tile set, these animations will be replaced, but they look good for now, not that you can see the idle movements of the animals if I only link pictures:

These animals are courtesy of a more complex animal editor:

There are unique tiles and names for all gender/age combinations. And that’s about it for new features.

But before doing this, I also did a lot of testing with the new rendering engine. I greatly increased map height for testing purposes and frame rate was smooth, but scrolling speed was very low. But after leaving for holiday, I did no longer have access to any of my computers and the ones I used were a lot less powerful. Here, scrolling has extremely slow, even with normal map heights. So I wrote a new scroller.

I seem to be doing this way too much: greatly improving existing features rather than adding new ones. I plan to change this. With the new renderer and scroller, I have a great isometric engine that does not care about map horizontal sizes and cares very little about map height. Scrolling is constant cost and near zero. Performance is surprisingly uniform on all machines with hardware acceleration and pretty predictable without. So I’m calling it done.

For the immediate future, I am going to try and finish all partially implemented features (not perfect them) and then get a version together and make a ten minute demo of solid gameplay. Also, need to do something about graphics.

Statistics:

DHCore:  1866 lines / 44.3 KiB / 11 files

DH: 2680 lines / 67.2 KiB / 15 files

DHEditor: 618 lines / 15.9 KiB / 13 files

Total:  5164 lines / 127.4 KiB / 39 files