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[Alekz]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Regarding controls, I'm not sure how you've set them up. If you're trying to emulate Magic Carpet, think of a hoverboard. Controls would be your standard FPS WASD (front, back, sidestep) with mouse aiming, just making the player have little friction, and maybe making the JUMP/CROUCH buttons modify height.

Yeah, this sounds very similar to how I did it (except no friction yet).

Linux build runs on my system, but there was a bug. I have a wide screen (1024x600), ...

Runs cool for me on Kubuntu 64-bit, though at an ugly low resolution.

Linux build runs by default in 1024x768, the only way to change it, at the moment, is via command line, like "OnTheWing -screen-width 1024 -screen-height 600" (in Windows there is a launcher for that).

Cool little demo you've put together. with the recent build I found the controls to be pretty unwieldy; mostly because I couldn't revert the vertical mouse movements in the menu options, didn't seem to work.

Strange that menu options don't work, are you sure you didn't try to change "Controller / Reverse Vertical Look" (this option is for gamepads only) instead of "Reverse Mouse"? In any case, I indeed should make "Reverse Mouse" off by default.

I can't remember how it was in the original, but in this I found the controls a little annoying - mainly because it's very difficult to come to a complete stop.  Some small amount of friction in the movement would not go amiss, I think.

You can stop completely by pressing the Left Alt button, but adding some friction should be helpful anyway I think, I'll give it a try.

[Alekz]

I'm curious as to how you plan to use the terraforming on a mechanical level. My concern is that, depending on how it's utilized, the terraforming may end up just causing the level to look odd because the player simply created a bunch of giant holes and giant mountains. You would have to make sure that the terraforming power is balanced/moderated to a tee in accordance with it's use within the gameplay system, and because of it's drastic change on the playing environment.

It's one of my main concerns now - currently terraforming is just sort of a tech demo, but I want to make it more useful (and definitely less powerful), something more than just making holes in the terrain. In the original Magic Carpet series it was a cool feature, but not extremely useful from the practical point of view, if you think about it. In terms of damage, they weren't that much different from more traditional spells, like Meteor, and the terraforming effect itself was useful in caves but much less so on surface. At least I noticed I wasn't using them in combat as often as I would like. I have some vague ideas how to change this, like shape of terrain might control which areas you can access (e.g. impassable mountains protecting some area) + making "Lower Terrain" spells (which allows to remove these mountains) really expensive or hard to get access to. Or you could create mountains/pits around you castle for better protection from the enemies, something like that. Anyway, a lot to think about there.

[Alekz]

Procedural generation at the university where I do research is quite a popular topic these days. In fact, I'm curious, would you be able to explain your procedural generation method?

That is quite simple, actually. First, I created a spherical grid from a cube:



(Image borrowed from this great article which explains this process in more details.)

Each vertex of this grid contains various terrain data, such as height and "material" (sand, dirt, stone). This height/material data is generated using 3D noise functions from the Unity port of libnoise library, in a way that's very similar to what's described in libnoise tutorials and especially more complex example.

[Alekz]

After a long break a new build (v0.06) is here.



Changes:

• Mana possession. Mana dropped by monsters can be “possessed” with a special spell, it then increases player’s maximum health and mana.
• Castles. Player can build a castle which serves as a home base where the player is much better protected than in the wild. (The castle model shows off my incredible 3D modelling skills.)
• Mana collectors. Castle is also a home for mana collectors, that search for mana possessed by the player and bring it to the castle, this increases player’s health and mana even further. (Another demonstration of my great 3D modelling skills. I probably need an artist or something.)
• Sprint ability (by double-tapping forward key): player’s speed is significantly increased, but player’s mana is consumed while sprinting.