However, the developer bug had bitten deep, much of my fitful night being the consequence of a mind racing with ideas for an exciting new project. Thus, zombie like, I shambled out of bed this morning and over to my computer. There, I begun to mash keys indiscriminately, occasionally muttering to myself over mistakes whose obvious sleep deprived source was making this seem a futile endeavor...
... and yet, all things considered, I achieved a pretty good amount for a Sunday.
A display of a randomly generated world map (490x490 in size in this shot). The map turfs are generated via icon.GetPixel and icon.DrawBox calls. The tiles are interactive.
Originally, I was arraying this on a grid control. Thanks to the comments here, I was informed of a better way: array them on a separate map control. Same overall functionality, but without the gaps in between.
I haven't actually achieved my goal of allowing the player to place some colonists and putting them through some rudimentary commands, that would be the core of the game, but I did the next best thing: I gave them a very nice environment to act.
- The Radar above.
- The login mechanism has been heavily tweaked to properly handle player flow, directing them to a handy status screen as the world generates itself, then immediately taking them into the game when it's done.
- I tweaked my world generation routine and completely revamped the turf code. Now we've got impassible mountains (which likely will be mined out like early Dwarf Fortress) and fertile plains naturally grow near rivers. Irrigation methods are planned.
I have a goal: I need to make this game playable in a week. Not necessarily release-worthy, but playble. The challenge now is not getting bogged down in the wrong parts of the game, or before you know it I'll be captivated by a digital ant farm so long that I lose my mojo again.
Speaking of getting bogged down, this world generation routine is nice, but it takes a good 6 minutes to run those rivers. (I used my pathing algorithm to create that more natural curve you see there - rivers like to avoid mountains.)
Because of this, and I've lots of testing to do in the future, I think the next likely thing that's going to go into the game is a means to save and load the map. I expect that to be relatively simple since the world map is already being stored in a LummoxJr Swapmap object.