So I thought I’d post a little bit with what’s going on.
Between work and mild illness, I haven’t actually gotten much at all done on MMORPG Tycoon v1.1. But here’s my work log from this week:
- Substantial modifications to the map and subscriber code, in preparation for rendering monsters and devs on the map.
- Monsters now spawn on the map, but do not yet interact with users. (In the 1.0 series, monsters were handled using probability calculations, a bit like random encounters in many single-player JRPGs. In the 1.1 series, monsters now have individual placements on the map, will attack nearby subscribers, and will respawn after being killed, as generally happens in real MMORPGs)
- Made substantial (CPU-side) performance improvements to the graphic engine.
- Added a nice effect to the roads when loading into a game, so that they don’t just “pop” into place any more.
- Small modifications to map rendering, to make it more GPU friendly and less cluttered for complicated maps.
- Began work modifying the “Build” toolbar to support the new building types (resizing and moving buttons, etc).
- Dramatically simplified building handling code, to make it easier to add new building types.
- OS X build now saves preference files in ~/Library/Preferences and save files in ~/Library/Application Support/MMORPG Tycoon, as Apple recommends. This should stop occasional user permissions problems with preferences not saving correctly in multi-user OS X situations, and will also make it much easier for OS X folks not to lose their saved games when updating versions.
Note that this is all going into the 1.1 build; there is no new build available for download yet. It’s just work in progress.
Anyhow, hopefully the progress summary will be a bit longer, next week! :)
