Bay 12 Games Forum

Microsoft is up to something -- poor documentation of their OpenGL implementation.  All of my textures had been compressed to 16 bits because I said that an RGB element has 3 components, which it does.  However, if you say it has "GL_RGB8" components, you suddenly get 32 bit color.  Everything looks a lot nicer now.  There's still some pixelation, but the trees for instance look much better.  I'm glad I've been working on these silly graphics games lately, or I wouldn't have spotted this one -- one of my bitmaps in one of my silly games was insanely posterized compared to what I had drawn.  Now it looks nice again.

Area exam in 6 days.  Then I sleep for a week.  Then maybe I'll get something done.  Who knows.  Life is death.

There are swarms of little creatures now.  These are critters like ants, although I didn't check if there were cute miniature swarming mammals and reptiles.  I suspect so.

Now I'm going to allow the player to pick up clods of dirt and crush them and stuff.

Then travel interface...  then massive amounts of clean up.  Things are more done than they were a while ago, anyway.

I've finished all of the animal placement in the ecosystems, except for the really small stuff...  that means grass, twigs, rocks, ants, beetles, worms...

I should finish grass tonight, and the other things this weekend.  The last fundamental element I need to work on after that is the travel interface and map knowledge.  Then I'll conclude with lots of frills, including crushing items, as per Zonk's request.

Then it's magic, clothing, and Mayhem Visits the Quaint Thorpe (in that order)...  I never thought I'd see the day...

Saving and loading is done.  Not thoroughly tested, but done.  I was able to reload a game and run around again.  I have to take off for school now, and I have linear algebra office hours until 6:15 PACIFIC, but I will try to put up a version tonight.

Corpse processing got fairly screwed up sometime during this process.  That isn't a big deal, so I'm going to go ahead and put a version up.  Then I'll try to fix that and the boatload of fatal crash bugs that people find with the save/load process.  Once things are running smoothly (and I get up to something like a 'p' or 'q' release), it's off to the editors!  And reptiles and insects!  And human without tails!

I didn't quite make it -- and I'm not nearly done yet.  I've been hitting a number of bugs.  Although I've dealt with the ones I've found, I still need to write most of the save/load game functions.

I managed to fix it up, although it still feels vaguely unstable.  Maybe I'm just not used to it yet.  Save files are way too big right now...  there's a lot of worthless information stored in corpse pieces for instance, and the game saves every little tissue chunk that was torn off of your player or anything else at any time.  The ability to travel all quickly around the world (which was never meant to be permanent) also allows a player to bloat the file pretty fast with empire/town/building information and so on.

For example, after playing a few fairly simple games in the same universe, my file was around 700K.  Of course, those Woolly Bears tore my last player into pieces for a long time before she finally died.

In any case, I have to finish actual save games before I see how large these files will actually be.  Then I can think about trimming them down.

To end on a positive note, actual save games were the last thing I was planning before the release.  I might be able to finish it up for Sunday night, maybe not.

I finished most of the universe saving functions today.  I'm going to try and finish those tomorrow, and do the actual save game functions on Sunday.  A Sunday release date is looking really unlikely, because the cleaning I did before has totally screwed up corpse processing.  Maybe I can still make it.  I'll give another update tomorrow...  I have to go to sleep early so I can finish grading and entering grades into the computer by the deadline.  7AM...  I'm not sure I'll survive getting up that early, but it must be done...