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[Neonivek]

Bilgolril doesn't sound too bad. I imagine it sounds like "Bill-Go-Rill".

I will admit the crazy names are growing on me Fniffolomodindonaman

[lemmily]

Post to watch!

This project is totally cool. It's pretty inspiring to see what you can do in 8 days of coding totally would take me months and months!
I would be really interested in seeing the code for this - I don't  know java, but it'd still be interesting! So I will await the day you open it up for people (if that is still your intention of course!)

[Killjoy]

I would be really interested in seeing the code for this - I don't  know java, but it'd still be interesting! So I will await the day you open it up for people (if that is still your intention of course!)

Yeah, I will open up my messy code for people.
I didn't really know Java either when I started this project (I used it a few times at work and when I was studying). I actually hated it. But I have it like that with a lot of new languages, but it is growing on me. It has one or two really nice features, beside portability.

I rewrote the rendering to use OpenGL, and shaders. It took a bit longer than expected, I never used openGL with java before, so it was a bit weird. It runs much faster now, and opens up for a lot of possibilities for visuals.

[Fniff]

Suggestion about the names, maybe make it syllables instead of letters and limit it to about three, four or five syllables per name?

[Killjoy]

Suggestion about the names, maybe make it syllables instead of letters and limit it to about three, four or five syllables per name?

Fine, I'm updateing the langauges, so they get a few interesting more features.

EDIT:
Okay, here is the plan. Each language gets a few more parameters. Besides a list of syllables for general words, names get a list of their on syllables.
Female names, and male names, can now have a list of pre/post fixes.

For an example. One language most male endings will have harsh endings, such as 'te', 'ku', 'ge', 'go', while female names will have more 'soft' endings, such as, 'na', 'ne', 'me', 'ma', 'la'.

This should make the names a bit more interesting.

EDIT 2:
Alright, it is in.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah, these names are way better, I like the guy/girl named mayor. I still need more variety in naming. But I am honestly not good at that.
Anyone interested in helping me add data to the random name generator? The job consists of adding syllables to a XML file.

[Valtam]

I've been reading this post for a while, but I think it would be better to get some notifications as updates come by, so I'm doing the proverbial "Post to watch".

Loving how the concept has evolved in such a short time, this game sure seems promising. How are trade routes being implemented? I've seen a few screenshots with dark red traces, and that they represent roads, but are they built depending on terrain features? Do they try to take the shortest possible route?

[Ancre]

I'm posting to watch as well. This is very interesting.

[Killjoy]

I've been reading this post for a while, but I think it would be better to get some notifications as updates come by, so I'm doing the proverbial "Post to watch".

Loving how the concept has evolved in such a short time, this game sure seems promising. How are trade routes being implemented? I've seen a few screenshots with dark red traces, and that they represent roads, but are they built depending on terrain features? Do they try to take the shortest possible route?

Roads are calculated using an algoritm called A*. It finds the route with the smallest "cost". For now the cost is just based on change in height. But I plan to change it around abit, so it uses Biome information instead, with different cultures giving varying cost modifiers. Such that desert traders will often route through deserts, while other civs attempt to route around them.

BTW, big update post coming up soon. I've done quite a lot of work, but sadly very little of it has been gameplay related. Either way it paves the way for gameplay features, soon enough.

[Killjoy]

Day_9
Creating a character, and rewriting a lot of code

Hey all.
I've been quiet about this project for a while, mostly because it took a long time to actually decide how to proceed with it. If you remember the first posts, I talked about how I rendered the world only using software. This mean that the graphics card idles, while the CPU is working it's ass off. For low resolution games, this is fine. But for this project it became more and more apparant, that most people probably would not be able to run it because of software rendering. My own beefy i7 laptop had trouble rendering the world at satisfying speeds.

So, I decided to give the LWJGL library a shot. LWJGL stands for lightweight java openGL library, and is essentially a wrapper around openGL for java. OpenGL being a high performance graphics library which uses the graphics card to render stuff, meaning it is way faster for most people. There was one problem. None of my rendering code was set up for openGL. this meant that a lot of code has to be rewritten, and a lot of new code had to be written.

The end results are very nice, so the effort was defiantly worth it.

After boxing the new rendering code into place, I decided to actually add a interface to create the world, and create a character for the world. OpenGL allowed me to scale the resolution up to something proper, instead of what I was using up to now, which was about half of what the screen was.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The biggest change in the main menu is that info box. I don't know if I will keep it or not. It is quite useful for new version info in the future.

I decided to make full use of openGL and actually render the world in the preview window of the world creation menu.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(Please don't mind the darkness, I will explain it later, it will get fixed)

I make full advantage of this in the character creation page, here the map automatically jumps to the starting city location when you toggle between them. This should give a really nice way of exploring the world, and starting locations.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now for some of the visual goodies openGL opened up for.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Here is the reason for why the world was so dark in the preview. The world starting date is year 0, month 0, day 0, at 00:00 am, which means it is night. OpenGL allowed me to implement a neat day/night effect. There is also a bunch of other effects thrown in for good measure. Fake ambient occlusion (The darker ocean areas). Fake waves, and wave specular reflections, and so on.

Here is the world in the evening again:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Here is one at midnight.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also implemented a bunch of other things. Such as entities now actively attempt to get married, there is space for improvement, but it works for now.

Last screenshot is how the game looks when rendering it at a higher resolution, I don't know what resolution I will go for. Time will tell..
(The world looks derpy because I was playing with the world generated when I made that screenshot)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That is it for today.
I'll work on making the character take its first steps next time, and I will probably add actual buildings to the cities too, the player and world entities can visit.

[stickadtroja]

New graphics, niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

i dont want to be a jerk or something, but wanted to write something other than "AWSOME WORK DUDE!!!111"... and since you using pretty fancy graphics i thought i would give some crits... but this is just some very minor stuff, the overall look is great!

anyways:

you got some real fancy water there... is the land going to match that? right now you have a little bit of contrast, from the super high res water, to the blocky and flatly coloured landmasses. would be supercool if you somehow blended between the colours and had some slight variation in to avoid flattness.
also the mountains seem to have much more organic forms then the rest of the landscape, how come? does the height map have higher resolution on specific areas or something?(i dont know crap about this stuff, just quessing randomly...) 

is possible to tint the fake ambient occlusion and shadows in some colour? i would suggest to put some blue in it, when you have a cloudless sky above, everything that lies in shadow from the sunlight takes a slight blue colour.

Also the the green is very saturated in the brightest areas, taking it towards yellow or brown just a little bit would make it seem more natural.

keep up the good work!

[GalenEvil]

That last screenshot is sexy as all get out! The 'derpy' look to it seems to be mostly from it looking like a topological map's elevation lines Could you use a vertex shader with a high resolution height-map to smoothly interpolate between adjacent areas? Then again, you said you were playing with the world generation stuff when you made the screenshot so this might be taken care of already

This looks fantastic already What are the dimensions of your world so far?

[Killjoy]

you got some real fancy water there... is the land going to match that? right now you have a little bit of contrast, from the super high res water, to the blocky and flatly coloured landmasses. would be supercool if you somehow blended between the colours and had some slight variation in to avoid flattness.

Yes, I will be looking into it. It is a concern of mine to add some more variety on the landscape. This is also the reason I switched to more advanced graphics, It allows me to add random details and clutter on the terrain.

is possible to tint the fake ambient occlusion and shadows in some colour? i would suggest to put some blue in it, when you have a cloudless sky above, everything that lies in shadow from the sunlight takes a slight blue colour.

Also the the green is very saturated in the brightest areas, taking it towards yellow or brown just a little bit would make it seem more natural.

Yeah, you are right, the colors need to be worked on. All the land colors are specified in the biomes, so it is not hard to adjust.

This looks fantastic already What are the dimensions of your world so far?

The world is 1024x1024 right now. It can in theory be any dimensions, the only difference will be that it would cost much more memory. The terrain is sort of raycasted, which means it is just a flat surface where the pixels are offset based on the underlaying heightmap.

Right now my concerns are getting some gameplay up and running.

[Neonivek]

So is this game going to eventually generate fantasy resources... or rather resources that don't exist in real life?

Or are you going to be chosing the fantasy stock from magic water to Newts to Oricalcum?

[Killjoy]

So is this game going to eventually generate fantasy resources... or rather resources that don't exist in real life?

Or are you going to be chosing the fantasy stock from magic water to Newts to Oricalcum?

I think it will be kinda a low fantasy setting. Mostly just different races and cultures, but probably no magic.

[Neonivek]

So is this game going to eventually generate fantasy resources... or rather resources that don't exist in real life?

Or are you going to be chosing the fantasy stock from magic water to Newts to Oricalcum?

I think it will be kinda a low fantasy setting. Mostly just different races and cultures, but probably no magic.

So no non-earthly materials like Squashberries?