If I'm already in a game and I click on the menu, I should be able to return to my game somehow...

The quickload and quicksave buttons in-game didn't work; they generated the following error messages, respectively:

switchmode game
savegame True
main  could not execute:  savegame  /  True

loadgame True
main  could not execute:  loadgame  /  True

The quickmenu button with question marks ("????") causes the game to quit... or crash.

The in-game map editor is very cool. I like the ripple/wobble effect on the brushes. I clicked save after creating a dense, lush ecosystem (I exaggerate), but I don't think it was serialized, and I couldn't subsequently reload.


Overall, it was a very solid pre-alpha first release. [smile]

Thanks for trying it out Oluseyi!

I probably should have mentioned that the save/load buttons don't work because, well, saving and loading aren't at all implemented.

And yeah, the "????" button does indeed either call the program to exit; I should probably just take that button out because I have no idea what it should do, I just wanted 6 buttons in that panel. Heh.

But hey, I'm glad it all worked and nothing terrible happened!

It worked for me too. Excellent work!

I like how your tiles have some variety; they appear to change slightly when you put down the same tile that's already there. They also fit together nicely. The grass even appears to have some volume; the blades seem to stick up over an adjacent desert tile. You should do some taller grass to show off the effect even more. The mountain and hill tiles look great and the animation works.

Some issues:

1. I noticed you can't put down tiles in the bottom 1/8th of the map.
2. It paused for a few seconds on startup, saying "remaking bg". Is that where you're doing some tile compositing?
3. Clicking on your minimap doesn't change the viewport (unless you right-click, but then its as if you right-clicked on the terrain).
4. Its a little bit slow right now, which means when you quickly lay down a row of tiles, some will be skipped over. You could solve this by acting on all tiles that intersect the cursor's translation vector, but more speed would be even better. Its also causing the interface to appear less smooth.

Thanks for trying it out Dave!

Yeah, there are 8 variations on each terrain type and 4 variations on each transition that get chosen randomly upon change.

1: Damn, good find. I knew it did that at the horizontal extreme, then I resized the map and it seemed to work (which isn't a solution, I know). It's a rather boggling issue that I can hopefully fix as I refactor my isomap class.

2: Actually no, there's no compositing (and maybe there should be). The pause came from generating GUI panels which, after creating some charts with the app that Oluseyi recommended, I discovered was due to an exponential increase in blit calls as the size of panels was increased. I was blitting a 4x4 image over 800x600 pixels, which is ridiculously stupid. And even worse because the 4x4 image was just colorkey green. Anyway by my use of past tense you can see that I fixed the problem this morning by increasing the size of the image to-be-blitted exponentially to match the size of the panels. I'll write a full explanation on Tuesday, but it should suffice to say it runs very nicely now!

3: Yeah, I didn't implement that yet. It should be pretty straightforward but it requires making a GUI element with rather unique behaviour. I just have to suck it up and make it, I suppose.

4: Yes, I want to do the vector thing! And the speed has increased, as I said, and should increase much more as I optimize rendering, which I have no done yet -- though I have organized my code a bit more properly so that I -can- optimize it now!

Again, thanks for the feedback!

Tried it out and it ran without any errors except those already mentioned. I like the auto-fringe feature and how you randomly select brush of a specific type. I also liked the fact that the interface was easy to learn; in moments I was placing hills and mountains. :-)

Your scrolling could do some work though. I would have liked to be able to drag the scroll direction according to the mouse movement. Something like Photoshop has with its “hand” tool. I also would have liked to be able to remove objects on the map, mountains for instance.

I have to say that it was enjoyable to create a map. Very good demo/alpha!

O-san:

Quote:I would have liked to be able to drag the scroll direction according to the mouse movement.

That'd be a good way to do it -- maybe right-click drag will scroll to keep the controls sorta consistent (right click to change view, left click to change map).

Scrolling has been a difficult issue with me because I'm used to full screen games where you simply scroll with the map edge; It's more difficult to make scrolling "transparent" when its in a window.

Quote:I also would have liked to be able to remove objects on the map, mountains for instance.

That's a completely obvious thing that I didn't really think much about. It should be a simple matter to add an "erase" entry to each editor palette (except for terrain because the "void" terrain crashes the game, heh heh).

Thanks for trying it out, the feedback is very useful to me!