I was in Auckland, New Zealand, I'm now in Melbourne, Australia, which is my home city anyway (I was born in Box Hill). I'll likely meet up with Allstone at some point, we should really have a DRLFF meetup sometime O_o

Anyway, there's likely to be some game updates with pictures soon, or at least some art. I'm going out to lunch now.

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FF.

Small world, eh?

In development news, I've got to sleep, but may get something done before heading off to uni to meet the head of my faculty tomorrow. Here's hoping so, I've been having fun but getting nothing (dev-wise) done for too long.

tree tweaking quickly, plus tile work. Will be masked in game, obviously.

Y'know Geti, I find it a bit unsophisticated to use my screenshot for the thumbnail to Prelude and not give credit, but I forgive you.

Anyhow, I haven't checked back here in a while and I'm excited to see whats new.

EXILE in sight yet? ;_;

Exile's not in sight yet, no, but you mentioning it just now and me getting my tablet some semblance of working just now has made me think about working on it.

I'm wondering whether or not to go tiled with it, honestly. Per-pixel physics just aren't on my to-do list of things to code at the moment, and I'm more likely to use Flixel than Love for it now :/

It kind of rules out the whole "hand drawn everything" aspect though.

WANT TO TEST THE LATEST VERSION OF PRELUDE'S TERRAIN ENGINE?

Click there. I need feedback. I want to make it create rubble tiles upon landing on the ground but didn't get around to that tonight, surprise surprise.
You're guaranteed to get a bit of a shock if you dig into the side of a cliff and try to cave in a nice large chunk of terrain.

It's still a little finicky, but that's why I moved all of the data to its own class rather than a flat file parsed each time: it'll make tweaking easier.

I've yet to see how the constructions will perform, but I did get some spriting done.

Should be fun to implement this week.

I've still got oh so much refactoring to do it's not funny ._.

blog version

The ground seems extremely unstable, it's really hard to make a tunnel without destroying half the world.

Dig deeper, then. It's gets more stable the deeper you go.

I just spawned above an empty pit...

Yeah, that does happen. I'm going to completely rip out the current level generatation system and replace it with a chunked system though, so no fear. It is a testing version, after all.

On the menu for today, after eating, showering, printing many things for uni and making sure my friend's okay:

• Tweak the terrain values so that it sticks a little better, while still making floating islands difficult to create.
• Implement a "chunk" loading system for the terrain, with only two hardcoded chunks, ground and solid (think _ and # in terms of tile content) available. Figure out how to handle streaming.

The thing is I'm wondering exactly how I should do chunks. I think something like this might work:

Will the game "zoom out" on a macro chunk? Is this loaded in scenes, or just split like this to make it easier to load? I REALLY WANT THIS GAME.

Oh, right, I haven't explained what the chunks actually are properly.

The entire game world will be stored as chunks. It follows to reason that it will also be loaded as chunks.
All of the chunks directly adjacent to the one your character is occupying will be held in memory and updated at any given time.
Upon moving around, if you move into a new chunk, some chunks will be unloaded, and some will be loaded, all seamlessly, for an arbitrarily sized procedural world, the only limit of which is disk space for saving the data. I may make it keep some of the more recent chunks in memory but not updated to save loading and unloading them.

I'm planning on storing the chunks in 800 byte (20x20x2) + metadata sections, which may or may not be compressed. I'm wondering whether the extra overhead will be detrimental. I'll test out a lot of the if ands and buts later on.

GOD DAMN HE BLINKED

So, I revamped how constructions work a lot, and started working on some more gamey functions for tiles, like jumping through those platforms.

Cool stuff that might happen soon involves chunked loading and a new playable version for you guys. I've played around with the terrain a lot though now so I'll get chunks loading first and send it your way if possible before bed.