Development updates

So I thought I’d post a little bit with what’s going on.

Between work and mild illness, I haven’t actually gotten much at all done on MMORPG Tycoon v1.1.  But here’s my work log from this week:

  1. Substantial modifications to the map and subscriber code, in preparation for rendering monsters and devs on the map.
  2. Monsters now spawn on the map, but do not yet interact with users.  (In the 1.0 series, monsters were handled using probability calculations, a bit like random encounters in many single-player JRPGs.  In the 1.1 series, monsters now have individual placements on the map, will attack nearby subscribers, and will respawn after being killed, as generally happens in real MMORPGs)
  3. Made substantial (CPU-side) performance improvements to the graphic engine.
  4. Added a nice effect to the roads when loading into a game, so that they don’t just “pop” into place any more.
  5. Small modifications to map rendering, to make it more GPU friendly and less cluttered for complicated maps.
  6. Began work modifying the “Build” toolbar to support the new building types (resizing and moving buttons, etc).
  7. Dramatically simplified building handling code, to make it easier to add new building types.
  8. OS X build now saves preference files in ~/Library/Preferences and save files in ~/Library/Application Support/MMORPG Tycoon, as Apple recommends.  This should stop occasional user permissions problems with preferences not saving correctly in multi-user OS X situations, and will also make it much easier for OS X folks not to lose their saved games when updating versions.

Note that this is all going into the 1.1 build;  there is no new build available for download yet.  It’s just work in progress.

Anyhow, hopefully the progress summary will be a bit longer, next week!  :)