Steps

Recently I finished the menu system to my safisfaction. That is you can, from the menu, continue a game of one of several users. There I've left the code hanging because I know it's time to tie the game back into my code base. If I don't do it now (and god knows I've been putting it off long enough) then the two pieces aren't going to fit together easily.

I'm about half way through. The minor things are namespaces changes (and there seem to be lots but hopefully everything will be better organized from here on out). The non-minor thing is going to be the revision of how time works. Getting to the compiling-again stage will be a big step. The codes a monster as well. There's just so much of it. I'm going to have to start developing a lot more seperately and then patching it in.

Of course I suffer from ADD like everyone else so I can't do just one thing at once. I've also been unsuccesfully trying to get a scroll bar to work. Currently it renders correctly but doesn't function, so that's something to look into.

And I've been playing with various name and conversation generators. I've currently got something complicated in Lua along these lines but I'm not satisfied with it and want it more complicated still. I couldn't find an IDE I'm even vaguely impressed with therefore I've been using notepad and a dofile instruction in the lua interpretter . . . there has to be a better way.

I've also been playing with python but I haven't done anything of note. I'm thinking of writing out nearly all my combat enginey thing as a text based program first, possibly in Python using curses. Then I can just slap the logic on top of my game.

I've had several ideas about how to expand my random quest engine thing but haven't touched it in a while.

The goal for the week is recompiling. I don't think this will be a problem but you never know. After that it will be smoothing the interface between menu and game.

Gah computer crashed.
Anyhoo it's compiling and the menu link is in :o I was amazed that it worked. Took 260 odd build errors to be killed off. Also for some reason it's really slow and there are gaps in the tiles. And there are also big white lines that I remember using for debugging the camera but it's cool and I'm happy. It almost feels like a real game. Now I just need to spend time messing with it so that's it's beautiful again :D

Interesting links at the moment include:

Using Cellular Automata To Build Random Dungeons on rec.games.roguelike.development

and

Automated storytelling and interactive plot in games on GameDev.net (which is rather wishy-washy but interesting all the same)