{"id":729,"date":"2009-09-10T20:16:38","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T10:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=729"},"modified":"2009-09-11T16:19:21","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T06:19:21","slug":"graveship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2009\/09\/10\/graveship\/","title":{"rendered":"GraveShip"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MMORPGTycoonGraveShip\"<\/a>So today I started work on the GraveShip, which I’ve mentioned a few times in the past. \u00a0In MMORPG Tycoon, the graveyard is treated as the intersection between the development world and the in-game world. \u00a0Everything that enters the world or leaves the world comes in or out through these graveyards. \u00a0(The only exception being new subscribers, who appear in Starting Areas)<\/p>\n

The question that one has to ask, then, is “If everything comes into the world through a graveyard, then where does the first graveyard come from?” \u00a0In MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, the answer was “It just appears magically<\/a>.” \u00a0For version 2.0, I have a better answer. \u00a0In 2.0, we have the GraveShip, which is essentially a flying graveyard. \u00a0In order to place the first graveyard in a region, you must first fly your GraveShip into that desolate region; \u00a0your AI developers are able to enter and leave that region via your GraveShip until a proper, permanent graveyard can be established. \u00a0In fact, the player can expect to spend much of his time on the GraveShip; \u00a0it can give a much higher viewpoint which is great for placing buildings and roads, and travels much faster than trekking about on foot. \u00a0My current goal is to aim to have the player spending approximately a third of his time on the graveship (which will mostly be building towns and large-scale map design), a third of his time on foot (which will mostly be placing small rewards and inspecting individual subscribers), and the final third of his time in the super secret game mode which I haven’t talked about yet. \u00a0:)<\/p>\n

In this screenshot you don’t get a good view of the graveship; \u00a0that’s because I’m currently standing on it. \u00a0You can only see one of its corners, in the bottom right corner of the image. \u00a0Like most of the other graphics in the game, it’s currently placeholder, but functional. \u00a0In your button bar at the bottom of the screen (not pictured) is a Summon\/Dismiss GraveShip button, which calls a GraveShip to your location, or sends it away. \u00a0I currently have the GraveShip spawning and moving to where you call for it, and the player can jump up onto it and walk around on top of it, but cannot yet actually fly it around (not much more work will be required to make that functional, though).<\/p>\n

Other stuff going on.. \u00a0in the screenshot above, you may notice (but probably not, as it’s rather subtle) that I’ve made some large changes to the heightmap generation algorithm, and substantially raised the clouds. \u00a0The upshot of this is that (in my opinion) the structure of the terrain looks a lot better, and we can now have much higher mountains before they clip into the cloud layers. \u00a0This change should hopefully also allow me to cheaply generate low-detail versions of the terrain further out into the distance, for very little extra cost in terms of rendering speed.. but I haven’t actually tested that yet.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, GraveShip flight, and UI switching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So today I started work on the GraveShip, which I’ve mentioned a few times in the past. \u00a0In MMORPG Tycoon, the graveyard is treated as the intersection between the development world and the in-game world. \u00a0Everything that enters the world or leaves the world comes in or out through these graveyards. \u00a0(The only exception being…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-bL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}