Made mouse border less restrictive - instead of physically keeping the mouse to the game borders, simply keeps the in-game mouse to the borders

Added a sleep if thread updates faster than 100 ms in game

Big internal clean-up - maps and positions are now based on 1 as the unit, instead of 8, which was an artifact of the tile size

added mouse cursor to world map and position so you can tell where you are

in the middle of a big innermap overhaul; previously each world map square represented one inner map, but this doesn't really make sense because you can't get any correlating information between the world map and the inner map intuitively; now each inner map covers a 5x5 space on the world map. Working on accurate generation of the inner maps and stitching them together accordingly.

Embarrassing that there's still a bug in pathfinding, but I fixed it. (only applies to player commanded move, where a check was being made too early).

Annual End of Summer Development Pause

School is starting in August this year, so the development pause will begin a little earlier this year. I've already distributed a playable version to friends, but I'm hesitant to put it up on the web without knowing what I'm getting into. Development will be scattered if not nonexistant for a while again.

Added the first two gods, Arur and Obmzhgak!
Added the quest system and tested it with a single quest! (After worshipping Arur, find and kill his nemesis. Then bring back his heart as proof.)

Worked on lighting a little bit: expanded the light radius of fire and used the canSee line drawing algorithm instead of straight distance.

Wall building is in.
Big code cleanup again.
Working on lighting map a little bit: fires now illuminate their own tile and the surrounding ones:

Added other sentient races: if you attack them they'll attack you back. If you give them enough items, they'll follow you and attack who you attack! Otherwise they just wander around. They also do the same actions for other NPCs.

Added a give command so that you can improve relations with sentient NPCs.

Played with river generation a little more.

Played with factions; need to globalize them rather than having them be individual to each NPC. Or maybe not? Might be interesting to just average all the faction data from each type of NPC to derive a global faction relationship list.

Maybe at entering a town of that NPC type reset factions for all NPCs to their aggregate averages.

Swapped to nonfixed update time. Seems to be more consistent and fixed the "slippage" issue.

Added evasion and randomness to attacks.
Tweaked some stats numbers.
Added a UI item for the current building item.
Added UI feature so that if you click on the message list it expands/shrinks.
Edited hunger so that a full bar is 10 minutes - chikkberries refill 1/3 of this.

Played around with throwing items a little today.

There's something weird with XNA and C#; I'm suspecting that if the program doesn't reach its framerate requirements, code is just dropped. On a map with 50+ NPCs, reducing a NPC's HP to/below 0 registers a kill from the Player Object perspective, but doesn't reach the remove NPC from the total map's NPC content in the NPC setHP method. This is obviously a huge problem, so I'll be reading up on how XNA works in more detail.

Exp and leveling is in; just need to adjust some numbers and add saving of it.

Added a few new items (Deer Pelts, Beds, Gems) and recipes (sword, armour, magic ring). Need to add deer dropping pelts, and gems as a rare rock wall drop.

Beds need functionality added, but should be easy.

Edit: saving is done, pelts are done. Things are so nice and easy now with all the code revisions!

Revised and cleaned up building code in preparation for the big push to add more items/buildables/monsters.

Added the build menu; everything is pretty much set!

Lot of restructuring. Almost done with everything; just need to pass the additional dictionaries into the map  object , and handle the constructors for everything to take in the map object rather than each individual list/dictionary in the map file...

Pretty boring work.

As it is right now things are good though and speed (cpu non-usage) has been increased dramatically.

Redid the fog-of-war map stuff as well.

Cleaned up the fow map update again - should be much faster that it does at most something like 196 checks rather than a possible 40,000.

Player's equipped items are now saved as well.

Big implementation:

Item saving should know whether or not they are equipables - DONE

I learned how to use XML to do this! The items now have an xml file that's pretty easy to edit and work with and also has the bonus of converting between different item child classes easily. Now all I have to do is call an item by it's name and it's completely implemented correctly from the xml file. This also means that adding items will be extremely easy!

Checking off the list:

• Inner maps should be saved in their own file. - DONE
• Having some way to move from one inner map to an adjacent one. - DONE
• Inner maps should only be generated if they don't exist already. - DONE
• The seenFOW map doesn't get rid of old things once they've been removed. - DONE
• Item saving should know whether or not they are equipables - do this via switch on the name I guess

4/5 isn't bad. Feeling ridiculously unmotivated so probably going to do some work on adding features to terrain rather than anything else.

Added some more map generation stuff. Dead trees for desert, bushes for grass land. The world doesn't look so sparse anymore. The fifth bug above needs to be fixed ASAP: can't even use consumables because they're a different type!

Did some cellular automata smoothing on the side areas of the inner maps. Looks not so obviously half-ellipse now.

Also prevented continuing on the title screen if no save file exists. A little polish makes the draft feel a lot nicer.

Things I did:

• World generation is hard. My plans were to use the world map to make tailored inner maps, but actually implementing it is a pain. I have a little of that, but not enough. The maps generated are ok - not especially interesting, but good enough. Write-up and map generation write-up forthcoming I guess.
• Changed things so that the worldmap is basically a static image and a separate screen so that you can hit "m" and see it (and zoom/move the camera around in it) and then esc to return to the local map and the game. This makes things a lot nicer.
• More bug fixes with saves and map generation and blah blah blah. 
• Straightened out the code. Nothing interesting feature-wise, but makes things easier code-wise. Wanted to make the inventory/equipment menu a little nicer, but it turns out that is hard too!

Things I need to fix (tomorrow?) before finally getting back to feature adding:

• Inner maps should be saved in their own file.
• Item saving should know whether or not they are equipables - do this via switch on the name I guess.
• Having some way to move from one inner map to an adjacent one.
• Inner maps should only be generated if they don't exist already.
• The seenFOW map doesn't get rid of old things once they've been removed.

Feature adding I need to get to in order of what order it should be done in:

• Make it really dangerous at night regardless of terrain: wolf spawns only happen on forests, and aren't frequent enough to force the player to seek safety.
• Buildable menu - to select what B builds. 
•      fire for woods
•      rock walls for rock
• Hunger - to force the player to scavenge. Saving of hunger.
• Equipped stuff should stay equipped.
• Exp system and leveling up. Saving for player stats etc.
• More features for each biome type. Right now only rock walls on rock tiles, grass on grass, trees on forest. Maybe a few trees on grass/soil, dead tress on desert, bloodmoss (as enemy) on swamp..etc.
• Enemy spawning - will be interesting again because I'll get to do some thinking about goblin towers, wolf caves, and roaming ogres on plains on the worldmap.

• More equipment types.
• More items.
• More enemies.
• Go back to inner map generation and ensure that if rivers are adjacent to other rivers, they connect. Rivers adj. to seas connect. Lava to lava connects.
• Make lava passable again, but...If you walk over lava you should take huge damage.
• River flow. If you walk over rivers, you should move with the river flow. 

More kludging to iron out some bugs from yesterday.


Worked on better inner maps. Implemented a cellular automata algorithm for smoothing - looks decent.

Separated new game from game initialization in general.


Kludged through map generation!!!


There's now a 200x200 world map, and a 200x200 inner map for every 1x1 world map.


Rather than generating them all initially on world generation, the inner maps (and the surrounding inner maps) are created whenever the player enters then. The inner maps are based on their neighboring inner maps so it all should link together quite nicely. Inner maps are currently just floors and walls, but additional generation can proceed smoothly from here after some code cleanup.

From the picture you can see the world map, a zoom in, the inner map, and another zoom in. The difference in coloring is because I waited till day in the world map but took the screenshot at dawn in the second.


The inner map is a little laggy - something like 60% * 200 * 200 = 24000 wall objects to keep track of. Hopefully it'll be better when I turn fow back on and update doesn't need to draw all of that.
EDIT: And turning back fow does indeed remove the lag. Whew!

To clarify for yesterday - saving now incorporates item/wall hp, as well as inventories of Player and NPC; still need to add effect saving, equipped item saving.

Worked on world gen - rather than just using a single Perlin Noise array for worldgen, I've incorporated many of them and tried to get stuff generated procedurally from it. I'll write a proper post on this later because it's been a lot of fun.

Here's a picture of what I've gotten so far:

Working on river generation right now, which are in lava tiles for easier visibility. Black is "ice" tiles, but I haven't made a tile for them yet.

Worked on saving a little and worked on worldgen a bit

Mainly bugfixes and optimization - now that combat isn't the only source of damage I needed to make sure dead checks happen right on going below 1 HP - otherwise silly things like dead monsters still attacking or attacking already dead things happened. Also cleaned up some holdovers from the previous hardcoded 5-squares-around-the-player check for explored map objects and vision in general. This means that fog-of-war and explored territories are fully accurate now.

Tried to complete saving and loading - currently exploring the built-in c# serializers but I think it's likely I might just go back to plaintext and worry about encrypting it later.

Added drop tables for monsters.

Next up will be fully finishing saving/loading, playing with enemy/ogre spawning, fleshing out the world gen so that the world map represents tons and tons of smaller maps, or playing with map generation. All good things to do!

Added knockback effect: sends effectee flying backwards a certain distance or until they hit something they can't pass - in which case they take damage unmitigated by defense.
Added berserk effect: increases speed and hp, but decreases vision and takes dp(action).
Added ogres: they berserk if they take any damage, and do increasing knockback based on their hp.

This was a lot of fun to watch and test: after the recent combat changes, the player by default can't do enough to damage to pierce the generic enemy's defense. So to kill any of them, I needed to setup an enemy between myself and a wall and then hit them into it for knockback damage.

Ogres are really, really tough. I setup berserk so that you gain an initial 50% HP, but you lose 10% every time you can act. Berserk lasts for 5 of your initial turns. So for a monster with 10 HP, you'd go to 15 HP, but rapidly lose 1 HP for 10 of your turns (as you're moving at double speed), until you end berserk at 5 HP. The problem is ogres have pretty high defense and hit hard in addition to their knockback damage - if you're stuck in a corner ogres will drop your HP incredibly quickly. Even with the player getting 10x their HP, and 2x their base attack I still died to a single ogre. Not really a monster to mess around with especially without ranged attacks.

Added line-of-sight via Bresenham's LA.
Added equipables (weapons, armor, accessories) and a really basic randomized loot generator!
Added equipment screen.
Added using equipment in combat/speed calculations now.

I've been using Trystan's blog (as well as Roguebasin which I think I've cited before) for examples on how to implement things.

Added general effects class (for item usage, buffs/debuffs, etc etc)
Added item use functionality (only one item has a use so far: basic healing grass item)

Added the inventory menu.
Redid the NPC and player classes so they inherit from abstract general character class.
(Item use still not functional yet though, but almost there!)

Blogspot has changed again...

Added a title screen menu and figured out how I want to do menus in general