Dev Diary: Layers Of Distraction

First, head over to Jeff's project post - not just because it seems like a neat idea, but because he shares my shyness to talk about stuff that isn't entirely cooked (although I seem to overcome said shyness regularly).

That said, this is funny - that early screenshot is completely obsolete now. There's nothing that remains from it. As I've mentioned before - Dreadnought is no longer strictly tiles. Rooms are layers which can be placed on top of each other. Doors mostly work - but instead of dynamic shading rooms will probably be "lit" or "not lit" at least for the time being. Line Of Sight is something I still have to fix, actually, especially for ranged combat.

And instead of scrolling - I'm going to rely on stacked content to provide ... ahem ... depth to the maps. So a "task" might have like five maps which link to each other and each of those maps might have five distinct levels to them. Levels will be interconnect by stairs and lifts - but probably also by simply falling.

I got a basic version of the editor working last night - so LOS and leveled play are probably my next two tackles. The Brother comes into town this weekend, so I don't expect to get much until next week.

It is, however, fast. I think I've found some theoretical limits on the number of HTML divs the page can handle at once and so I might have to add culling routines once I have a properly loaded dungeon - but I'm pretty confident that this approach will allow me build complex maps that don't bring down a processor.


tagged: game, gaming