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Thanks to information I’ve received today I’ve now been able to add the four City backgrounds into the project. There are different mountain range backgrounds within the City depending on whether you’re facing north, south, east or west.

I’m now having a go at adding the door signs for the various City establishments (E.g. guilds, shops etc). I thought I’d come up with a quick way of dealing with this but I’ve still got some work to do as the signs are not appearing from the outside of the shop only the inside! I’d forgotten how the City map structure works. My map structure can easily accomodate additional textures to deal with different wall types but would require me to edit lots of doors manually which I don’t want to do if I can avoid it.

Well it’s been a long time since I posted anything on this blog even though there has been a fair bit of progress on the Alternate Reality front in the last year. Whilst I’ve not done a lot in the last few months I did some good work during the summer and what I’ve produced to date is far better than what I had created in SDL. The screenshot here is from the City using the original Atari 8bit graphics. I have been very happy using SFML instead of SDL for my media library and so far it has delivered everything it promised. As before I’m concentrating on coding and using the original graphics and sound for the time being so as not to get hung up on editing new graphics all the time. SFML is platform independent with SFML libraries for both Linux and Mac (and lots of bindings) so I’m keen to find a couple of willing people to maintain these versions. Porting should be very easy as there is nothing Windows specific in the project to my knowledge.

So far I’ve implemented the following features:

• Improved 3D view window which is larger than the original game
• Smooth scrolling in the 3D view – finally!
• Different zones within a map to define different graphics in some areas e.g. Crystal Caverns
• Dungeon Teleports
• Dungeon location specific messages
• Weapons and Wealth status screens
• On screen Compass
• Movement around the City or Dungeon 1st level

OK so lots still to do but I’m pleased the smooth scrolling is now working as I expected that I would find this difficult. I need to say thanks to Jim Norris for providing me with the information on the map zones and the full Dungeon teleport data otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to complete these parts.

Next thing I would like to do is move all the game data into external data files. Most data is already in this format but some is included in the source files. I’d also like to add a simple option page so that players can choose between The City and The Dungeon. Once these are done I can get down to some interesting bits so that what I’ve done actually starts to feel like a game!

Progress is slow mainly because I keep going back and fiddling with little things rather than adding new features to the engine. There’s still no actual functionality or properties to tiles so this is really something I need to make a start on – it’s not difficult.Anyway there are a few cosmetic changes. I’ve added an Ultima style border dividing the screen into three main area – overhead view, messages and the character status/inventory browser type area. The 16×16 font has been replaced with an 8×8 one – currently Joshua Steele’s Ultima 4 Upgrade one. I wanted to be able to put quite a lot of textual information on the screen for combat, conversations and intentory details but this was difficult with the larger font and a smaller font also leaves more space for item graphics, status bars or icons which I think will make the display a lot more interesting. This font is good for now but I’ll keep my eye open for something a bit more unique.I’ve reverted to the David Gervais tileset and RLTiles tileset. Both are good tilesets with plenty of intersting to tiles though there are a number of typical tiles I’ll need to create/find elsewhere to complete some content.Really need to add some simple tile properties. Are tiles passable? Can they be seen through? Do they link to another map? And so on…

I’m finding it hard to keep track of how much time I’m actually spending on Demons Eye but I think my actual coding must be at about the 8 hour stage. The editor now has a working view and tile section for selecting tiles. Basically the cursor keys can be used to move around on the current map and the page up/page down buttons let you scroll through the tiles available. The left and right mouse buttons can be used to select tiles and place them down onto the map canvas. Some of these pieces of coding came together very quickly which was a pleasant surprise. The mouse coding in particular was very easy to do. The map structure is currently very simple with 2 layers – one for the landscape, walls, doors etc and another for monsters, characters and items. Ideally I should change the items into a linked list at some point to save on space and processing time. I’m also considering a third, middle level to cover decorative items – tables, rugs, blending tiles. This will allow me to reuse certain tiles over different base tiles without having to make multiple versions.I’m considering expanding the current tileset with some new landscpae tiles and will have a go at creating some of my own over the coming weeks. I think there are plenty of good monster, character and item tiles in David Gervais’ set so I should be fine there. A lot of features still to add to the editor before I’ll be able to really start using it but I’m making some progress.