But I did find the time to tweak some of my tools to remove more of the handwritten code and replace it with data generated from the maps. The final piece was for auto generating the teleport locations.

I have also enlarged my map, I felt it was too cluttered so I embiggened it and spread the continents out more. It always irked me a little to hop in a sailing shop and sail only a few spaces and traverse the seas.. So I made more use of some open space and moved things out further making sea travel longer, but not monotonous. Sea travel is important and it needs to feel like it takes you a while to get from A to B (and the movement speed of the ship is slower than that of land speed movement). It certainly wont be as redundant and monotonous as it was in Demon’s Winter which had huge tracts of open ocean and a very poorly laid out world.

Still beavering away on the combat engine affects

Now POR was not the first game to have the attract demo screen, the Ultima series had them since what? Number III I think, only it was more cut down, you did not see the real combat action.  Pool of Radiance cycled through lots of different screens and displayed a really great demo setup.

The second thing was when the player started a new game, you got that awesome guided tour that brought you into the game. I remember when you first walk in and see ivy on the wall, it was like, AWESOME in its pseudo 3D-ness.

I want this type of introduction in my game, but I’m not sure how to go about it. For the 3Dlik ness of POR it worked, everything is hidden that is not in the immediate view and reveals as you go through doorways and around corners, yet with my 2D tile approach you don’t get so much of the ‘reveal’ factor. Whats there is there, the LOS hiding does not have the same affect.

Right now I have a simple attract screen much like Ultima III with characters walking around the screen in random fashion (unlike Ultima III’s scripted sense). I would like to have an entire scripted display of some 2d tile action with a AI controlled combat (so it should be different each time).

Managed to split out the Cluebook from the Players guide so I can print separate booklets, for some reason I like that idea more than stuffing it all in one booklet. XeTeX rocks, I wonder why I never bothered with Latex years ago.

Tweaked some AI + A* pathing.

I need to fix some horse issues, and generate a list of enemies from nearest outward so the Next/Prev automatic targeting works.

I have horses appearing on the main map now. I learnt that I cant draw a horse to save myself! Ha, it looks so bad its funny. Adding horses to the main map proved slightly problematic mostly because the main map is handled different from the other maps because of its size and that all the maps are segmented, so a minor technicality on my part and we have horses appear outside town after you buy em.

Added some more attribute extraction to my maps so more things are generated by tools than by hand written code. Map transitions (entering towns, dungeons, etc) are no longer hard coded and handled in the tool.

So I picked some of that low hanging fruit I was talking about before, only what I picked was nothing in my list.. Still I got something done that REALLY needed to be done.

That being said, sometime in the next couple of weeks I hope to bash out the following;

- Using a horse for transport, this basically is nothing more than an icon change and an enumeration. The game already takes care of food consumption when on a horse or ship. I do need to test some timing so that the party can travel faster on horse than on foot.

- As above, but using a ship

- Proper testing of splitting the party. The code is all there but I need to knock out a script that allows you to choose whom you want in what party based on who is currently in your party (you follow me?!)

- Fix the bestiary, to log how many of each type of monster you kill and have it display other info like a short description to go with its battle icon.

I’m also thinking of rewriting the quest log so its not so much of an “You have 2 open quests. 1 - foo, 2 - bar, You completed 4 quests - .....” type plain boring list of stuff, but to make it more like playing the game writes your open epic.. or more diary like… the problem with going diary like is the diary then is required to be infinite as far as storage goes “You traveled to the city of X, you traveled to the city of Y, you traveled to the city of X, etc” each action is a point of data stored.  Showing a plain old open/closed quest list just uses existing data…

meh. If I were not restricting my memory usage…