Game prototype current status

Phew... a few days since I don't blog anything about CRP. First reason, holidays are over, I'm back to "routine", and since university takes a lot of time (after all, engineerings are engineerings), I've reduced the amount of time that I spend working on CRP. Of course, I could work on it on weekends or in my free time, but I also want to enjoy my free time, without computers, just hagnging around, having a social life, running or whatever, you know. Of course, I'm not saying that I'm stopping, I'm still working on it. Less commits a day, according to my Git repository stats, but it's still moving.

Also, I don't blog because I'm not adding new features for now, instead I'm improoving the ones that the game already has.

For instance, I'm working on a more lightweight rendering system. At the moment CRP attempts to render every single tile of the city every single frame, even if those tiles can't be seen by the player. Right now, map is hard-coded to be 16x16, that makes 256 tiles to be rendered per frame, and about 75.000 tiles per second in my old Core 2 Duo computer that I use to develop my software (laptop keyboards are lame, long life to old-and-noisy desktop keyboards!!!). I increased the map dimensions to 256x256 tiles (65.536 tiles per frame) and the results were that FPS dropped from 200 FPS to about 2 FPS.

This improvement is linked to the city logic improvement. I'm splitting my city into regions. Instead of having a big, big map full of tiles that I call "city", I'm creating some little maps called "regions", and I'm considering now a city a set of regions. Those regions work independently ones from others, so instead of rendering cities, I can render regions, based on if they will be visible or not. To the user, those regions don't exists, and he sees the map as a single big city, just like it has always been. Even road connection will continue working between adjacent tiles from separate regions.

The game is also being ported to states. Right now there are no states and my game is just overriding Slick2D's BasicGame class. This is becoming so tight as the game keeps growing and growing, that I've already started to convert the game into a state based game. The earlier I do this, the less painful it will be. I've already created three states: one for the actual play, and other two for loading and saving the city. City is a shared resource that all the states can access to. At the moment those extra states aren't visible because loading and saving takes just a few miliseconds, but it should be visible as I add new features and change the saved game format.

After I complete all these improvements, I'll tag that code as version v0.0.3. However, it's most likely that I won't share that release as there are no new features that I consider people could enjoy. Plus, I worked last monday on a launcher that would replace current game deployment system. You'll have more details about the launcher after I polish and release it and talk about it on its own blog post, but just to give a sneak peek, the launcher will replace the user: it will automatically connect to a CDN that I'm using to host the game assets, and it will download, extract and link the game. So, next release won't be a Zip file that you have to manually download from my Dropbox account and extract on your desktop, but a link to the page where you can download the launcher. Period. Easy.

Also, this is probably the last pre-alpha release. The game is already getting a plot, a name (Drive To) and even a Facebook page. Once it's ready, you'll see Drive To v0.1, first alpha release of the game. No more sandboxed prototypes, let's make this thing real, bi*ch.

And, pretty much, that's it. This has been a long post after all. My English is not as clean as I would like to, even if I have a good knowledge of it, so I'll just hope that it's understable. You know, the longer you do things, more risk you have in failing them.

City Road Prototype Pre-Alpha 0.0.2

Yay, second release! :-). Screenshot first.

So, v0.0.2. This prototype is growing and I've already got a few ideas on what to do with this code after this prototype is finished... won't talk about them right now, they are better protected in my head right now ;-).

Changelog:

• Widescreen. YAY! (don't know how does that affects my game)
• Isometric map. YAY! (awesome 2.5D graphics)
• Panning. You can right-click the screen and drag to move along the map. At the moment there's nothing interesting to see here as the map for now is fixed at 16x16 tiles.
• Tiles render darker if mouse is over them. That makes easier to understand that you CAN click (and drag) to create roads.
• As I said in my previous post, car has been removed. Priority issues: better to work on finishing and improving a feature before starting working on another. Car will be back soon, with a better AI.

save.bin file format has not changed, so maps generated with v0.0.1 should work with v0.0.2, and vice versa. Yeah, in case you didn't know, maps gets saved whenever you close the demo. If you open again the demo later, your saved map gets restored and you can continue working on it.

Here's the download link (multiplatform, Zip, 3,3 MB). As usual, I don't expect many people reading this but if you do and you download the game, I would appreciate any feedback, any thoughts or any bug report, write a comment below or tweet me at @danirod93 and I'll read it.

Isometric engine

No more orthogonal maps, CRP has gone isometric!

City Road Prototype has gone isometric!

Old 2D orthogonal map from v0.0.1

This isometric map looks a thousand times better than my old orthogonal map. Just compare this screenshot above with the one from the previous post. v0.0.1 city was plain 2D, like if you were flying above the city and you looked straight down. Now, my city has got depth, and you can see that some roads are nearer to you than others.

This has some advantages as I may add more features later. For instance, say that I want to add buildings. If I had to render buildings using my old orthogonal system from 0.0.1, you would see buildings from above, so you would see some squares. Using this isometric engine, you would see buildings as 3D boxes, giving the game a better look.

Plus, I've improved my grass texture as you can see. Grass textures are quite easy to do with any advanced image editor like GIMP or Photoshop, just fill your sprite with a solid green color, and then add some noise to make pixels randomly brighter and darker.

However, isometric maps need more processing than orthogonal maps. For instance, I had to remove the road designer, so right now you cannot add or remove road tiles by clicking them. I have to rewrite that feature from scratch. The technical reason behind that is that detecting which tile is the mouse at was easier on v0.0.1: tileX = mouseX / tileWidth, tileY = mouseY / tileHeight. However, things are now harder to do.

City Road Prototype

During this week I've been working on another game prototype in Slick2D. At the end of this post I will provide you download links to what I've done. Here's a little nice screenshot:

What you see here is called City Road Prototype.

This demo creates some green terrain (grass?). Player can draw streets by clicking and dragging the terrain, that will place road tiles. Game engine will automaticly make those road tiles look like streets and intersections if there are nearby road tiles.

There's also a car, that little red dot you see on the left. Game will randomly spawn a car if there's no one. Car IA is at the moment really dumb: they will only attempt to move forward; if the road ends, they will turn somewhere else to keep moving forward. It's dumb because sometimes they turn back doing a 180º turn, which is actually dangerous (at least in real life). Should check that so that they better turn left or right when possible.

Although I've been doing a lot of prototypes on the last months, this one is attracting me a lot. I usually let my prototypes rot as soon as they bore me. I just HOPE that this does not happens this time. Here is a download link to v0.0.1 (Zip, 3.4 MB). It's multiplatform and it has already been configured to work like a charm on any operating system out there so you should not have any issues. Just download and extract. If you are using Windows, double click the JAR file or run BAT file if you are having issues. Mac, Linux and Solaris users can run SH file.

I don't expect many people reading this blog post but if by some reason you read this and you decide to download my demo, please give me feedback about any issues you could have so that I can fix them on future alpha releases.