Is there any news?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes! It's been over a year since I've even touched this code (closer to two years), but I felt it was time to take a crack at it again. Interestingly, I've made some big progress, and I thought I'd share it with you.

First off, I decided that I really didn't like my idea of "live rendering" the game tiles (see below). I thought it would save me having to keep tile images in memory, but all it really accomplished was a slowly drawing, and very ugly map! I found a few ways to conserve memory, and redesigned the map layout to use tile scans. Since my tiles are fairly beat up, I decided to use the tile images that Brian has on his website (assuming he's cool with that!)

Curious to see the result? Check out a high zoom and a low zoom. Zooming is smooth, and controlled by the mouse wheel (I should probably have some way to do it in case you don't have a mouse with a wheel...) The map is moved around by clicking and dragging the field of view around. It works quite well, and is very intuitive (I think). I currently have all the logic for summoning and movement built into the code, so the map handling is done, for the most part.

I integrated the new map into the RealmSpeak application, and it works rather well. The application currently works fully well online, meaning that multiple players can join in, and add characters to the board. I improved the networking code so that data transfer is at a minimum, and information is passed quickly enough to not hinder play (DSL anyway - haven't tested 56K modem...)

I just started putting together the piece of the application that will resolve combat. This is just in the very early design stages, but is coming together nicely. (view)(view)

Any alpha-release projection? Well... ah... no, but that probably doesn't surprise you. As my life sometimes intervenes in my "free-time", and my interest sometimes wanes from this project (say it isn't so!!), I can't promise anything anytime soon. What I CAN say, is if anything comes to pass, you will find it on this page. I'm hoping I'll have something together that will pass as an alpha version in the next couple of months, but don't hold me to that!

I can say that I've finished my Wizards project (barring a few bugs), so it does happen once in awhile.

Until next time...