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[Houndninja]

Downloading the tech demo now! I'll tell you what I think once I'm done with it!

[jonarkanix]

Wow, looks great and the videos have sold me on the game. Downloading the tech demo now!

[Eigen]

Thanks everybody and sorry for the lack of updates. It's been a busy week and I haven't gotten much time to do the things I've wanted. Still, I made an options screen for changing the resolution and toggling full-screen mode, map mouse scrolling, made the view follow the selected unit and bunch of other stuff. The ease of changing the resolution and toggling full screen with SFML surprised me pleasantly. *Snap* and it's done. With some 3D engines, you have to reload the textures and what not.

This morning I checked the download count for the tech-demo and it had nearly doubled over night. It's now an impressive 80 downloads, which for me is ... well, impressive, given this things is barely anything. "What gives", I though, "Is the counter broken?".

Turns out this had appeared

I'm really happy that someones sees a potential in this, in such an early stage nonetheless, and is willing to share it. Thank you, Cassandra Of course the video in the blog is the very first dev-video, so really crude stuff.

Also, try-outtable build for the Macs, anyone? I'll build it up when I get to work.

edit: The link for Mac version of the tech-demo is now in the first post

[s_l_m]

Man, I have to say this looks awesome. I am flashing back to pirates hard just by looking at the screenshots. Keep up the good work 

[IndieGamesDig]

Congrats on the indiegames.com nod. I actually have a draft post about Pioneers ready on my site but was waiting for you to add a build with more features before I hit publish; figured you'd not want too many people playing a demo build with little more than walking around.

[saint11]

haven't played, or read all the pages of the thread yet, but man, this looks awesome.   

Have you played Seven Cities of Gold? This reminds me of it! If you haven't, please play it, it's great and can be an excellent reference!

Congratulations, this is amazing.

[Eigen]

Congrats on the indiegames.com nod. I actually have a draft post about Pioneers ready on my site but was waiting for you to add a build with more features before I hit publish; figured you'd not want too many people playing a demo build with little more than walking around.

I really appreciate it but yeah, I'd rather have a more playable build ready before doing so.
Working towards that

Have you played Seven Cities of Gold? This reminds me of it! If you haven't, please play it, it's great and can be an excellent reference!

Thanks, I haven't played it but by the looks and sounds of it seems really awesome, I should definitely try it out.


Devlog 6

So, this hasn't been the most productive week and half of the weekend is spoken for as well ... (going to a funeral) Still, got some things done.

* Screen resolution change / fullscreen toggle in the options screen
* Map scrolling with the mouse and view following
* Beginnings of an inventory
* Movement costs depending on tile types (read about it below)
* Object sorting was still acting up ... list iterator anomalies.
* Some changes to the pathfinder to keep it from finding a path to an undiscovered tile
* Some music overlapping crap on Mac
* I'm sure there's more because I feel like I've written so much code this week but I can't name any features.

Rest of the time has been spent trying out different ways to indicate to the player how many moves does it take to travel to a tile depending on tiles types and stuff.

First of all I tried allowing to move one step at a time and the accessible tiles were highlighted around the player with the movement cost displayed on them. Since the same system should've applied to ships, I discarded it because it was too slow to move around. Then I tried displaying the active path and movement costs at all times, but that didn't feel right because you only discovered that jumping over a river costs 2 points after you started moving. Not cool. For the last and current method I implemented it so, that the path and costs are shown when you hold down the left mouse button. Realease, the indicators disappear and it moves there. I like it.

The last thing that needs sorting out is if and how you should be able to move trough forests. If I discarded forests as blocking areas, the pathfinder would have very little to do and would basically draw a straight line between points, it would only use up more movement points. I feel that should not be the default case. Here are my options:

- Disallow movement trough forests unless you've "forged a path" (basically cutting the trees and lowering the movement cost to 1).
 
- Let the pathfinder decide if going trough the trees would use less movement points than going around them and return the appropriate path. If the player clicks on a forest, it goes there no matter what.

Here's how the path indication looks like:



Oh, and 180 downloads for the tech-demo. Crazy people downloading a thing that does nothing. Crazy

[oyog]

- Disallow movement trough forests unless you've "forged a path" (basically cutting the trees and lowering the movement cost to 1).

Off the top of my head I don't remember if you've mentioned whether or not there will be specific skills or character classes, but;

Personally I like this option the best, specifically if there's one kind of character that can move through forests without paths.  Perhaps a "ranger" class only available to natives?

[IndieGamesDig]

Nice, I like the more structured look of movement.

[Eigen]

Devlog 7

The 10,000 lines of code mark has been passed and the screen now basically blinks. Just kidding, it's further along than that but nothing spectacular still. These past few days have been pretty productive though. Lots of stuff rewritten, severe bugs crushed and some new things added as well.

• Professions added - Soldier, Scout, Hunter, Scholar and Craftsman
• When starting the game, you can now choose the profession and manage the inventory. Professions have skills, but you can't choose those. They depend on the attribute points. Eg. if you choose the scholar but don't give any intelligence points, it's useless as most of its skills are locked
• Reworked the building of stuff - you now don't build a camp because that didn't make sense. If you are carrying a tent, you can use it to set up camp. Building as a whole will be replaced by crafting.
• Objects (ship & camp) now also have inventories ... or storage if you will. When double-clicking, it brings up a window where you can see all the stuff stored there and another list of actions that can be done with that item. You can drop stuff off from the character inventory. Eg. you go hunt some meat and you drop it in the camp to cook it. Of course, first you have to craft a campfire from some wood and a source of ignition.
• Entering camps and ships is now done via the actions menu. Previously you clicked on the object and a yes/no message box appeared. I didn't like that as it didn't fit with the rest of the actions logic.
• Fixed: things following a path sometimes got their waypoints (and movement costs) mixed up
• GUI: completed the attributes / skills sections in the player panel. The sections are tabbed.
• GUI: lists are now scrollable if there are more items than can be shown
• GUI: an 'About' window added
• Other smaller fixes probably
• I drew the first animal, a bear, which I hope to put into the game soon:
  

Some screenshots:





Next up: I dread implementing the saving / restoring feature but it has to be done.

[Windybeard]

Wow, this looks really cool, from the video you get a real sense of exploration! Very impressive.

[Eigen]

Windybeard, thank you so much!

Today I spent some time upgrading to the latest version of SFML which luckily didn't change much but the naming convention. Of everything! After that I started working on the (de)serialization of objects. I have the basic system in place where I register the variables once and the serializer / deserializer methods write and read from the file stream. No need for stuff like writeInt("myint", 5) and readInt("myInt") which is nice.

The save file is in binary which might cause issues if you wanted to use the save file on a system that has different values for sizeof(int) and similar than on the machine you saved it on. 64-bit vs. 32-bit machines vs. Mac OS X vs. Windows ... does anyone know?

Okay, I finished the last of my cookies so back to work!

[Franklin's Ghost]

Hey Eigen looks like you've taken a big step forward with lots of new additions and tweaks. Coming along really nice.

Are you planning on having seasons? and different ratio of animals depending on this?

[Eigen]

Weather - sure
Seasons - depends

I'll get the worst option out of the way. What I have now could be the summer. In fall the trees would lose their leaves, leaving just the branches. It starts to snow. Marry Christmas. So far so good. When it snows, the ground and trees start to go white. That's the part I'm worried about. Having the screen full on green is okay, because it's not that bright of a color. But white ... I did a 5 minute mockup and it doesn't look promising. Obviously, the trees would have to be shaded differently ... with really solid white and blue parts and much less dithering. Still, too much white. Things that are drawn white to stand out from the greenery, no longer work either.


(Click for full-sized image)

Even though it's done quickly and is crappy, I don't see the potential in this.


Another slightly better option would be not to transition from season to season smoothly, but basically change the palette. December 1. Bang! It's winter. This, in fact, does not break my 4 color rule. My rule is that there may only be 4 colors on screen at once. No, I'm not making it up right now to justify it. That of course means everything including the GUI changes as well. It could look like this for the winter (minus the leaves on the trees obviously and maybe some ice gradually freezing in from the north) ...



In addition, maybe some of the frost effect could be incorporated into the UI.



Autumn could look like this (with half of the trees without leaves maybe):



Spring could be like summer but with less foliage.

What do you guys think, would this work?

[namragog]

Whoah 

this is beautiful now <3

[Ashkin]

Autumn needs more orange+yellow

[oyog]

I'm all for separate palettes for each season.  I think that the original palette looks the most appropriate for spring at the moment.

Autumn needs more orange+yellow

Yeah, I was imagining something like this for autumn;


It occurs to me the ocean would look really odd with a color scheme like this.

[Pineapple]

just dropping in to say that this game looks absolutely gorgeous

[Eigen]

Thanks guys, this really means a lot to me and keeps me helluva motivated.

Yeah, I think it's too monochromatic and doesn't really work with the water. This thing below, could it be better by any chance? I turned up the dreary dial to 11. Add to that the bare trees and I think it'd fit.



I'll fiddle with the colors some more tomorrow.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Think they definitely work and could see them in-game with the screen going black and a line of text saying new season has started or something, to transition from season to season.