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[ananasblau]

I'm slightly bored these days, not enough to actually add new features but I did improve the map's noise shader to make it look more blocky and added a new one for scanlines. I like how it's looking a bit more lively now even though nothing moves.



There's a few gifs from the steps as my dev progressed: http://imgur.com/a/rQqIQ

[ananasblau]

Relevations! First of all I followed the code by Amit a bit more closely, but more importantly I realized that I had to scale the elevation. I store it as 0..1 for the purpose of easier work in all my modules but when I calculate the sunlight on a 2000x2000 map where polygons are easily 100x100 in size, a height between 0 and 1 was neglectable. But with a 30000x scale it all works just fine. Well, better. I'm a perfectionist after all and still not completely satisfied as the sun colours aren't strong enough. yet.

[ananasblau]

More extreme, the blue sun moving along on the south edge of the map.

[ananasblau]

Yes, I should do features, but I'm falling in love with shaders.

Now with a slight distortion to get rid of the straight edges.

[ananasblau]

Every colonist has an inventory, the spaceship as well, so the inventory exchange view was a must-have and I just finished it. No duplication bug. And game is stopped when you open it. The view is very simple for now but might someday look as fancy as this one.

[ananasblau]

I'm getting closer to a release every day. After adding water sources to the map yesterday I've also added lakes and streams. All following the elevation of the map. Lakes won't overflow for now.

The obvious idea would be for the player to "plant" those water sources, maybe even change the elevation of a map polygon to create artificial lakes. Another feature I can now do is putting stuff like minerals into the earth and either harvest them by colonists or add machines to do that.

[ananasblau]

Even better, watering neighbouring tiles. I think the rivers would be more realistic if I turned them into bezir curves. But that would require a new data structure. Better not.

[ananasblau]

There are errors you don't notice for months until you find and fix them. Like the love.graphics.setCanvas that was spread across the draw and the update method. Why it worked I don't know. Anyways, it's fixed now and the rivers look more straight without the noise (actually I miss that noise  )

Oh, I added mineral deposits, no mining yet but a machine for that is next on my list.

[ananasblau]

Animated L-System trees. A little more performance and variations, and my colonists can put plants everywhere. But I won't simulate wind, not yet.

I think mining machinery was supposed to be next. Bad management. 

[ananasblau]

j-turn. player can't enter it yet but it drives. Also needs a boot. The graphics are obviously still placeholder and crap.

[ananasblau]

Gosh, it has been a long time. But don't worry, I had a little burst of activity in April and for the last two weeks I've worked a lot on the game and it is getting there. There is the GameStageExpo taking place next weekend in Linz, Austria. I've helped, show my own as well as projects from tigsource on the previous GameStage shows but the expo is going to be huge and I want my APRI50 to be part of it.

I found an artist to commission the concept art which I'm using on the non-map screens. Here's the screen that gives you information on the planet's atmosphere. Of course there's a simple machine to slowly change the atmosphere.


Lastly, not a big improvement but the map is getting busier, oh and I have a proper spaceship now. Even though it looks like an otter.

[ananasblau]

The the image above , with the screen, I got my statistics text all nicely integrated but I'm suffering a little with this inventory background mage. Any suggestions how to make it feel like "one piece"? Preferably the background will be changed depending on what unit you are looking on.

[ananasblau]

Absolutely out of hands but, the Flora extension does spawn plants on my map. Hurray. It needs a bit of sanity and the plants need to grow several stages, but this was a major step towards the upcoming expo.

[ananasblau]

Those trees and bushes of grass finally received the TLC they dearly needed. Just look at them growing over time, a bit random colour and I'm happy with them. For this iteration anyways. Next up is a few flowers and they will self-propagate! I'm getting very close to the prototype I actually want to show around this weekend!




Oh, and I got mail from my concept artist. She sketched a few suggestions how that terraforming machine (the fire spewing one with red rings) should look like and I will get her concept art just in time
The middle one is the winner, can't wait for a full sketch with surrounding landscape and everything.

[ananasblau]

A lot of things happened to the map today, within less than an hour and I must say, I'm very pleased with the result.

Upto now the points on the map, therefor the polygons, wer completely random distributed. I had some code to improve the points distribution but that was buggy so I decided to do it the other way around. Tak and a clean, smooth distribution (hexagons) and make it a bit random. It totally worked! No more long spear-like polygons. The other thing was to dump a little randomization I had on colour the map tiles. Sunlight will do the job much better. And lastly, grass received the treatment as the trees did yesterday. I will grow *and* spread with a few iterations. And for the trees, they are now growing in even smaller steps, even though it looks a bit buggy right now.

[ananasblau]

By pure luck I stumbled a line I thought that needed a fix. 15 minutes later I realized this also fixed my map's lighting.

Look at the upper left how it changes colours when one of the suns move across. Beautiful, isn't it? This bug has tortured me for over a year!

[ananasblau]

Just came home from showing my game at the GameStage Expo in Linz, Austria. Very successful, I collected 50+ email adresses for my newsletter! Other games at the show were Forked Up, Raeticon, Schein and many many more.

Showing my game to a lot of people did help me to think about it, what I want to do it and how I can people get more excited about it. My favourite lines:

• small actions causing many events, sorta the opposite of minecraft.
• Like a garden game. You plant things and sit back watching it grow

On the second day of the show I started a new feature, lowering and raising the terrain, thus allowing you to re-direct rivers! And of course I did show it to people right away.

lastly, I received new artwork, I think a few more and I have a basis to get a pixelartist involved for the units and buildings on the map.

[ananasblau]

This new feature is what I started Saturday morning while waiting for the first games on the game expo.
I can now raise and lower the terrain and any river will start to search for a new path, see how they even dry up towards the end of the gif?

Later this require you to send big machines, but you will be able to do this sort of direct terraforming in the game.

[ananasblau]

Will be a day or two until I have those contour lines finished, but that's what they look like in my sketchbook. Includes rainbows!

[ananasblau]

A whole week of trial and error but i'm very close to decent looking contourlines. A few edge cases -  steep border and more than 2 borders per polygon - are still open but I'm happy about this break-through.