A long time without a post. Sorry, this project is not dead, however I had more important things to do (like finishing my phd thesis
) in the last months.
It is quite some work to import an existing game to a new engine. I am also a complete noob in Lua. But I made progress. It is still a long road to go before I will be able to release a playable version.
I want to share some of my achievements and problems dealing with the t-engine and Snowfallen. These problems may or may not be completely my fault caused by my lack of understanding a quite complex engine.
In the last days I successfully implemented the Snowfallen map logic. In Snowfallen each map only uses 16x16 tiles. There are no exceptions. I wanted to create a sort of puzzle roguelike where you got complete information about your situation without the need to scroll around. A map might look like this.
- Snowfallen Map Example
- snowfallen_2_0_1.jpg (78.31 KiB) Viewed 18047 times
This is a screenshot within the t-engine. There were a few problems with that approach. I managed to use zones, levels and generators to generate a single map without a problem but now it gets a little more complicated. The world map consists of 16x16 maps each with 16x16 tiles. There is only one local map shown each time. Also there are fixed transitioning tiles between maps (shown as yellow circles). You can travel around the whole world map that way. Technically it was a bit tricky because there are several zones in the world map and each zone will have several levels who might transition to a different zone and level in a 2d fashion and everything should be generated randomly on the fly. As far as I know the t-engine only supports linear level progression (with branches in new zones). I solved the problem by translating a 2d level scheme into a single integer level value.
Also you can visit dungeons in Snowfallen like the entrance to a mine in the screenhot above. These dungeons are new zones that will span new maps in a 3 dimensional grid. In this case I translated the 3d position into a single integer level value again and it works quite well. It might look like this.
- snowfallen_2_0_2.jpg (27.37 KiB) Viewed 18047 times
So, basically the t-engine approach of zones and linear levels did need a few extensions to work but I think it works fine now. I also did code an algorithm that guarantees that all important objects in a map are connected. If they are not it will use a modified AStar-algorithm to find a way with the least amount of changes to the current map and will clear a path (instead of redesigning the complete map).
My next mission is to look at actor attributes and implement Snowfallen actor stats.
