Garden of (unpolished) delights

Although I have had very little time to spend on the project, I have made good progress. I have introduced several new features to the engine, and everything is starting to come together.  It is actually starting to feel like playing a game. Marvellous!

When picking up a weapon, it now goes to  quickbar, and clicking it  there will move it to weapon slot. Also the player character graphics is updated, showing the equipped weapon. Weapons have damage and speed variables, which are used in combat damage calculation.  In same manner,  shields  can be equipped and they affect player defence statistics.

I also have tested dynamic plants, something that was left over from earlier, unfinished project. Trees are created recursively from 10 simple branch MovieClips, giving thousands of unique tree shapes – just eyecandy, but pretty sweet, I think. Bark texture needs polishing… well maybe “polish” is not proper word here, they need to look unpolished and gritty, actually.

In picture below you can also see test for “baked” wall graphics – wall graphics are placed in floor tile graphics clip, and skewed. This way there is no problems with z-depth clipping, walls are always behind npc’s ad player character. Downside is that the scene cant be rotated, but the view angle is fixed. I also tested Lost Garden free textures – those cliffs look pretty sweet imo – well some careful smooth up scaling is needed though, cliffs look bit rasterized now.

deligthfully unpolished scenery - note player character weapon and shield.

Here is screengrab from the area “editor”  (which is just Flash ide, at the moment):

Top-down view of the area floorplan - walls are skewed

Other improvements I have made include LootCreator, which takes care of  loot balancing based on area level. For each dungeon level you can define items and their drop percentage.  I also optimized pathfinding for NPC:s -they now avoid each others, so monsters no more clump to same space,  but keep distance. This makes them seem much more realistic.

Hmm, Why do I get feeling that someone is following me? Well nevermind...

Testing with 10 NPC:s the framerate drops from 100 to 40 (with my mediocre laptop) so having around 10 npcs in area is realistic, but naturally I will do all possible opimization once its time for it.

With this level of productivity  I might get beta version out for Christmas!