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[Geti]

Update Update - Read all about it!.

God what is it with developers and lame jokes relating to updates?
Whatever, v0.17 has gone stable and been released (at revision 25 ffs) and you should play it. It's got pretty clouds by Lizard and a million settings for you to turn on and off and an extra tile for the background of your houses and goodness knows what else. Read about it on the blog.

[sereneworx]

The clouds look significantly better. I'm really still having trouble reading the main character though, it almost feels like he doesn't fit in the with rest of the environment.

[Geti]

Really? I'm not sure where your gripe is though, is it with the style of the character or with the colour or how it contrasts with the terrain? I'm confused, but I've spent hours looking at the pixels so I'm not the best judge of it.

[sereneworx]

overall, everything just bleeds into everything else. It's the subtle glow effect you have over everything. It blows out a lot of the detail.

[Geti]

The bloom postprocessing is disabled by default, that last screenshot was just to show what it looks like.

That's how the game looks without bloom. I'm pissed off that the character is mid-blink in every bloody screenshot I try to take, actually. Have you seen the game in motion? I'm more concerned with readability while playing than in static shots tbh, but I suppose anything I can improve I should improve.

[Ben_Hurr]

This looks amazingly like Minecraft only with Zombie apocalypses.

I LIKE IT

[DanFornace]

I really love the idea as well.

Now make me hate itttt!!!



Just kidding. Been following this for a while and really hope to see it get finished. Also i think the sky may be a bit saturated which is making the character push back into it in an odd way rather than popping forward.

I imagine you change the sky in this type of game so you may have other colors/saturations, but that blue could probably be a bit lighter/less saturated and the character chould use a hint of contrast.

Also that black on the tiles looks odd. Is it final tilesets?

[Geti]

The tiles are able to be changed whenever, but I'm unlikely to do much more with the earth tiles besides add a few more types. I don't know what to do with the overlay really, currently it's black but it's quite harsh.. I just don't want to give anything about the underlying terrain away, because it makes mining more interesting.

The sky does change from day to night, but I haven't started doing any overlays graphically yet (ie tiles don't get darker at night time), that whole system is in its infancy.

You do realise that there's a playable build available here right? Day/night is in the most recent public update, it's one of the things I'm looking for active feedback on.


Glad you guys like it, but it's a little frustrating that you can't make a game with destructible square tiles without getting compared directly to minecraft these days. Ah well, at least it's a flattering comparison.

[Rumrusher]

The day to night point system really helps with the whole conserving ammo survival nature of the game where spending 6 shots on a plant-zombie that's walking around the fort a missing 6 shots down the road when building a small storage and a screw up leads to a hole in your fort.

thankfully I learn a thing or to on building destructible ladders and bridges so cutting off zombies while scaling huge cliffs to start a fort isn't a major pain. major pain is digging to deep and getting my self killed from falling in to the hole.

[Geti]

A request thread has been started on the forums, go nuts. Keep in mind that any reasonable requests still probably won't get seen to for a few weeks, but I'll still listen.

High score tables might happen this week.

[Geti]

WANT TO TEST THE LATEST VERSION OF PRELUDE'S TERRAIN ENGINE?

Click there. I need feedback. I want to make it create rubble tiles upon landing on the ground but didn't get around to that tonight, surprise surprise.
You're guaranteed to get a bit of a shock if you dig into the side of a cliff and try to cave in a nice large chunk of terrain.

It's still a little finicky, but that's why I moved all of the data to its own class rather than a flat file parsed each time: it'll make tweaking easier.

I've yet to see how the constructions will perform, but I did get some spriting done.

Should be fun to implement this week.

I've still got oh so much refactoring to do it's not funny ._.

blog version

[Geti]

On the menu for today, after eating, showering, printing many things for uni and making sure my friend's okay:

• Tweak the terrain values so that it sticks a little better, while still making floating islands difficult to create.
• Implement a "chunk" loading system for the terrain, with only two hardcoded chunks, ground and solid (think _ and # in terms of tile content) available. Figure out how to handle streaming.

The thing is I'm wondering exactly how I should do chunks. I think something like this might work:

[Geti]

For clarification:

The entire game world will be stored as chunks. It follows to reason that it will also be loaded as chunks.
All of the chunks directly adjacent to the one your character is occupying will be held in memory and updated at any given time.
Upon moving around, if you move into a new chunk, some chunks will be unloaded, and some will be loaded, all seamlessly, for an arbitrarily sized procedural world, the only limit of which is disk space for saving the data. I may make it keep some of the more recent chunks in memory but not updated to save loading and unloading them.

I'm planning on storing the chunks in 800 byte (20x20x2) + metadata sections, which may or may not be compressed. I'm wondering whether the extra overhead will be detrimental. I'll test out a lot of the if ands and buts later on.



I revamped how constructions work quite a lot, and started working on some more gamey functions for tiles, like jumping through those platforms. Going to try for chunk loading tonight, but I have to sleep early so it's not guaranteed to happen, uh, at all.

[Geti]

Tiresome News.

Essentially, no fresh alpha tonight, but progress is being made towards the streaming terrain part of it, which is currently busy imploding and not suitable for release.

[Geti]

Update, Update, read all about it!
or
Play here, fuck reading!
(not recommended)

Contains:

    * Chunks
    * No grass
    * Debris from fallen tiles
    * Building tiles that work(ish)


Feed me back.

[Alex May]

I think you need to highlight which square will be dug out when you wield the shovel. Not knowing which bricks would be removed caused me to lose a great deal of health just from normally digging (which is also a separate issue - it seemed to be too easy to get crushed by falling blocks). Also digging straight forward seemed to ignore nearest blocks and dig through into the wall in front. Also digging up seemed really unreliable and I couldn't get it to remove some of the background blocks above me even though their adjacent background tiles had been successfully removed with the shovel.

Also it's not clear when things are going to decay and drop rocks on your head (seems a bit random) although I suspect that is intentional in that you intend to have preventable cave-ins.

[Geti]

Also it's not clear when things are going to decay and drop rocks on your head (seems a bit random) although I suspect that is intentional in that you intend to have preventable cave-ins.

It is, though I think some visual wobble in the tiles as a warning could be a good idea, just before they drop. The terrain system has been put back into its infancy by being torn to pieces over the last few days, so there's bugs everywhere.

Noted on the digging, and though the background tiles being hard to destroy is semi-intentional, it still needs tweaking I've got a lot to do on the items system in general soon, but I want to get levels generating properly in all directions before I continue.

Cheers for the first good chunk of feedback in a while!

[Geti]

New Testing version with infinite terrain and a lot of bugs!

[Geti]

Still on Testing!
-> Not on the page yet!
-> Click here to play!

Welcome home.

Sorry folks, no zombies yet! That's because I've drastically altered the way the world works and so I've got to tweak how they interact with it. I've also got to iron out all those huge AI Issues. However, things that are working:

• Procedural Level! Not streaming yet, but at least a little more interesting! That means there's a pretty huge performance hit if you go wandering off on older hardware but those of you with the clock cycles can go off and hit up the wilderness (which is currently pretty sparse).
• Cool support system! I'm annoyed to find that this system works better than the previous one by a lot. Build to your hearts content and then enjoy watching the fireworks as you bash out the pillars and the whole thing comes crashing down!

So maybe the caves don't all line up.

Known Bugs:

• Screwy Support: for some reason the seams between some chunks are broken, afaik it's the edge of existing chunks facing into newly generated ones. This'll screw with you climbing some of the cliffs, but whatever.
• Botched cave generation: sometimes the caves generated are a bit crap. I'm looking into ways of making them more interesting, which will include small forts (possibly with some zeds scattered around), items to scavenge (which means more items) and also mosses and possibly seeds (though that'll be part of the plants arc of development).

Sure do wish there was something to shoot around. Building is awesome, though.

That said, there's still a lot of work to do for this arc. Here's the short term plan!

• Reintegrate Zombies because we all like having something to shoot. This is the main reason it's not on the official page yet..
• Get handmade chunks loaded fairly often. This is to supplement the procedural tiles. It'll let me build some really cool situations, as well as some more smooth corners to climb up! Making buildings happen is easier this way too, though I'll look into fully procedural buildings as well. You'll be dumped into the wilderness at the start of each game once this is working, rather than at a home fort.
• Integrate a loading stack to get rid of those nasty stalls as chunks are created. Essentially, I'll spread that processing time over a few frames.
• Fix that damn support bug! because it makes building really huge things impossible :C

The long term plan is a bit more in-depth, but hopefully that's enough to sate you.
I'm off to bed, I'd love some comments.

If you'd direct comments here and bug reports here I'd be much obliged.