So after about a week’s break, I’m venturing back into code again. I’ve mostly been starting slow, with  minor improvements to the code, before starting on the big ticket items that lead toward finishing milestone 1.  First up, I’ve improved the placing of roads.  For anybody who played with version 1.1, you’ll recall that if…

Yesterday I showed the first bridge in MMORPG Tycoon 2.  Today, I’m showing the first human-placed mountain range.  Under the new system, you can place big terrain features using almost exactly the same interface as is used to place roads.  Select the type of terrain you want, then draw a line showing where you want…

So I decided to use my existing “road” functionality to handle terrain placements;  in the same way that you can place roads to link together buildings, you’ll be able to place “terrain strokes” (todo:  find a name for these that doesn’t suck) to adjust the terrain in various areas. This had some advantages and disadvantages.…

It’s kind of neat, when you realise that your systems are generic enough that you don’t actually have to write much code to get interesting effects. Previously, the “selected building” effect I was using was just to draw a simple wireframe box around it.  But there were bugs which caused the box not to z-buffer…

I’ve been poking around a bit more with terrain/building authoring, most recently with an MMORPG Tycoon 1.1-style overhead view map, which you can zoom in and out. Those who’ve been around for a while will remember that this was the original idea for how 2.0 would work;  you’d have a 1.1-style vector graphic map, but…