According to my issue tracker, I’m currently 78% of the way to the Milestone 4 build (which is about the mechanics of creating roads and towns).  That’s close to ready, but almost certainly not close enough to complete it by the end of this week.  More likely, I’ll finish it up sometime next week.  When it’s ready, I’ll post builds to the blog, as usual.

I’ve also noticed a fairly important bit of functionality which got missed in my planning;  implementing nice systems for monster placement and quests (which are related to each other).  In my planning, those came after Milestone 4 (Towns), but were assumed to already be complete before Milestone 5 (Metagame).  I may add a “Quests” milestone after 4, to get that work done, and renumber the Metagame milestone to 6.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on improving the placement of buildings and roads, with a focus on roads.  The new system, I think, feels a lot better, and is more interesting than the old one.  It catches a lot more bad situations, and should generalise out well, to handle bridges and other types of path.  Plus it’s more intuitive for players, which is always a good thing.  I’m working on a more in-depth post about the new road system, which should go up on Friday.

In other news, I’ve been running into some big limitations from rendering using OpenGL 2, so it’s pretty much definite that I’ll be switching VectorStorm to my OpenGL 3 port (still deciding whether to use OpenGL 3.2 or 3.3).  That will let me do some much more efficient rendering, particularly from the zoomed-out map view.  This means that when I do make that switch (sometime after Milestone 4), there’ll be another RenderTech build for people to test.

I’ll post updates soon, with more details on exactly what’s going on!