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[dmoonfire]

Also forgot, I got some sound effects done with the awesome sfxr program and toyed with music (didn't get far on that though).

[dmoonfire]

I hate being sick. And I hate summer colds, but I did get a tiny bit of coding working.

Figured out how to do better display of the world, so it now has the squarish-look to the world. I also changed it so the blocks are 1 meter high (about half screen). That way, your Acrobatics skill will allow you to jump up. I'm leaning toward 10 points of Acrobatics = 1 meter jump, so a 100 Acrobatics will let you jump up 10 squares (there will be hidden areas in the non-existent dungeons). You'll also automatically jump when you try to get into a square that is too high at this point. Complete with sfxr-generated jumping noise.

For the time being, view range is only 20 meters or so. I'll get the epic view back in once I get more of the game working properly.

I did manage to get the procedural generation of the world into the system. Right now, its taking a 512^2 image and creates a 16384^2 world that changes slightly for every new game. Mostly the beginnings of the trees and grass placement is random per-game and even most of the layout of the terrain is per-game now. It also cuts the install size by 300 MB or so. So, that is a good thing.

Got an entire weekend to blow off on this, and I'm planning on doing that. I should have screenshots later today or tomorrow, depending on progress. Forgot to throw them on the thumb drive for today.

Plans for the weekend are:

* Finish basic world generation
** Placement of plants, grass, and trees.
* Random Encounters
* Death
* Skill Improvement
** Leveling
** Sleeping/Saving
* Sound effects
** Maybe music (going to steal at first)

[george]

dmoon, this is incredible.

[dmoonfire]

Well, good time to stop for the night. Damn my need for sleep, and at least a bit of doing something other than programming. So, I got a bit done. There is a random assortment of trees and bushes. The models themselves aren't procedural but their placement is so it tries to create "forests" and it will be unique for every new game. I stole a few free tree and plant models online (well, made some with ngPlant and stole some) so they don't really look "in place" with the world, but I'm happy so far. There is a slight memory bug, it doesn't unload the trees very well so if you run fast enough, you can overload your memory (just save, quit, and come back in).

(To save: ` s RET)

There is also death in the game, but the only thing that will kill you are falls. So, create a character with a very low Athletics and Acrobatics and run around, you'll die or run out of fatigue. To recover fatigue, just hit SPACE, then select "R" for rest and enter the number of hours. You can also do that to see the sun rise and fall (or hit + or - for the debugging version).

There are some sound effects in the game, mainly for feedback. Also, if you are running around, you'll occasionally notice a message of "Your Athletics has improved!". If you hit F1 to go into your character sheet, you'll see it progress. If you make Athletics and Acrobatics your major skills (during character creation), and improve them 10 points, you'll notice a (+1) on your character's level. When sleeping is implemented, you'll be able to level up and increase your attributes.

Oh yeah, and the archive is under 4 MB and the uncompressed is under 12 MB. Procedural generation for the win. :D And the world is huge, takes about 15-20 minutes to run across it (with no tree placement). You can cheat by doing "` p 12000 6000 400 RET ESC" but be careful, you can fall to death. Maximum theoretical size is 16384 squares (32.7 km) across by 256 squares high, but effectively its only about 14k (28 km) square from one end of the country to the other.

New Alpha (0.0.2): http://mfgames.com/games/lethes-yarn/lethes-yarn-0.0.2.rar

[dmoonfire]

And another screenshot, sorry about the size.

Forgot to mention, this does require .NET Framework (probably 3.5, maybe 2.0, don't know) but it doesn't need XNA.

[dmoonfire]

Okay, I'm not going to get much further. Just too much and I don't have the time and managed to burn myself out. And the more I realize how little I actually got done, I kind of get depressed. So, I'm going to call it STOPPED and this is pretty much where I'm going to call it a contest entry (though it isn't a complete game).

http://mfgames.com/releases/lethes-yarn/lethes-yarn-0.0.3.rar

I fixed the loading problem with trees, so it stays pretty zippy as you zoom across the world. There is random encounters, but the only thing you can do is really (R)un away. You can turn off random encounters with "` tel RETURN" and "` tgm RETURN" will make you immune from fatigue.

Now, if this make it on a poll (probably the "would have been great" secondary polls), I'll follow what I said in the first. One major feature for every vote. Otherwise, I'll just move on. But, I spent two days trying to put in combat and realize I was scraping up against a wall.

[dmoonfire]

So, despite not being on the list for voting, I do have some questions for anyone who downloaded and actually tried the last (any) version:

1. Was there any problems with running it?
2. Any trouble with the sounds?
3. Any trouble with the resolution/startup?

Partially, I'm hoping to at least get some of the base library stuff working for the next project (BSG) and it wouldn't hurt if I got at least some things right.

[Melly]

One problem I had running it was that the window size was enourmous. I couldn't play it like that, unfortunately.

[dmoonfire]

Well, that would make it somewhat hard to play, wouldn't it? Looks like I have it hard-coded for 1280x960. If you want, I can switch it back to 640x480 on the next Windows reboot (I use Linux most of the time). I meant to make it user selectable (and optionally full screen), but just ran out of time and energy.

Oh, and thank you for responding, I was getting discouraged.

[Will Vale]

I knew there was another one I wanted to try. I'll try and d/l this tonight, thanks for the reminder.

[edit] Loads and runs fine for me, I don't think I had any sound at all though. I got rather mobbed by goblins near my start point so I didn't get to explore much, but the environment looks interesting. Nice one.