Fields of Steel Stretch Forever
"And yet. I know so much, and care so little. Defeaned by chatter, weighed down by revelations - I am all, but wish to be none."
- Terminal getting pensive about their quest
The Games Foxes Play
(complete source code - mirror | view all previous posts | play 0.4.3 online in browser on itch.io!)
Hiding behind a crevice to escape a passing-by patrol of robots in Cogmind, taking two steps forward and one step backwards to clear the Elven Halls in DCSS... There's a lot to like about sprawling roguelike maps, with their many twists and turns presenting opportunity for crafty adventurers.
So, when I looked at my own game, and considered the loop of "clear square room of all enemies" -> "move to next room" -> "repeat", I couldn't help but feel something was wasted. Due to the structure of the tutorial I initially built my game from, when a room was left, it ceased to exist and entered a state of stasis until the player visited it again.
I couldn't tolerate this any longer.
Fields of Steel Stretch Forever
This has been quite the neuron-frying rework, but TGFP now has full-floor, interconnected maps! The layout is still based off square rooms linked with each other, but the most important feature is that entities other than the player can now move wherever they please.
The implementation proved quite challenging. First, to properly generate a unified map, I randomly generate a 9x9 grid of "walls" and "floors" with no isolated floors, then pave each "floor" with a prefabricated vault, chosen at random among multiple possibilities. Finally, I scrape the data from each "vault" and build a single giga-room (>6000 tiles!) from the extracted data. I was expecting this process to turn my 128 MB VRAM, 8 GB RAM laptop into a miniaturized sun, but everything somehow remained perfectly fluid!
Then, to actually display the giga-map, I thought "let us just render every single tile and move the whole map around when the player moves". Bad idea. There was the miniaturized sun I was after.
Finally, I settled for a 30x30 grid of "projectors" which dynamically update every turn to reflect all tiles in range 15 of the player. It's just like DCSS - the player always remains at the centre, fully enabling any narcissistic tendencies the user may have!
Following this implementation, I struggled very hard to bring back the zooming animation from last week. Initially, it was skewed and caused an annoying lag spike at the end. I worked 5 hours to fix it, butchered my game completely beyond repair and had to undo all changes. Fun.
In the end, some performance testing revealed that the big memory-hog was the function assigning sprites to every single tile, including the black space between the rooms. All it took to fix the lag was a single line of code in the graphics engine: "if tile is not in play area, return".
Cyan Suns Burn the Horizon
The scope for the coming months is... a little imposing. I have a significant addition I wish to add to the core gameplay loop, and I also want to overhaul the pathfinding algorithms from basic-baby Greedy Manhattan Distance to something a little more appropriate for a 81x81 map. So far, the only things tanking my performance have been graphical issues - the back end has never caused any problems. From what I've read about the nightmare A* & friends can be, I expect this may change soon.
I sometimes regret a little choosing JavaScript to get started (but I think harder languages would have demotivated April 2022 me, even though I would be able to handle them now). I am getting frequently trolled by "undefined" types parasiting my data and coming out 5 minutes later to break everything. But, on the other hand, I am massively benefiting from the lack of compile times (offset a little UI element by 3 pixels and instantly see the difference!).
These next weeks will either be glorious or a train wreck. No in between.