Back from Con, it was a blast! Meeting David Tennant and Billie Piper was especially cool. 😀
Back on the game, I decided to step back from combat engine work for a bit and get the rest of the game functioning. At the moment it doesn’t even come up to a playable state, and I’ll want that for the convention next month. I spent a few hours dealing with various errors caused by some refactoring I did (the debugging tool in Classic99 is PRICELESS in this regard) and got the character creation and introduction fully functional again.
And it went total black screen when it tried to launch the game… it turns out none of my map data was in place. 🙂 So I’m working on getting that all populated.
I’m also re-working my elevation system. I had intended to store the data uncompressed but I realized I could actually compress it VERY easily and store it in a much more efficient way in sectors with offsets. Since there are only 4 elevation levels, I can store them using RLE with a single byte indicating up to 64 characters for a given elevation.
The big issue there is writing a tool that will let me define elevation for the various maps without losing my mind… I originally was going to incorporate it into my map/light editor but it’s complex enough that breaking it out into it’s own tool is the best idea.
One nice accomplishment was finishing my transaction and mob tools so now ALL text in the game is embedded with the transaction scripting and mob definitions. Now I can add and remove text easily and just rebuild the entire thing in seconds. That’s going to be very useful for content creation and fixes down the road.