Not a whole lot going on. Still doing various tweaks to the AI system. I've finally started the project I've been postponing for awhile, of ripping out the inventory management system from Golem 1, and updating it for this project. I'm generalizing it a bit, to more easily implement other objects that make use of a gridded inventory screen, such as shopkeeper inventories ala Diablo, treasure chests, and even a Stash or two. In the process, I've done some refinement of the item system.

In the original Golem, items were a weird hybrid of static data structure and script hooks. The base ideas of the item system originated before I began using embedded scripting, so items were an aggregate of various flags and attributes that had to be accessed through various means, and which had an effect that was hardcoded in the game engine. The scripted functionality was added later, and a lot of the weirdness of managing items came from the uneasy alliance between scripted and aggregate structure. I've done away with the aggregate structure almost completely; items do retain some aggregate features, such as banks of generic bitflags that can be used as the item designer wishes, and some special case attributes reserved for use by the engine (none used as of yet), but for the most part all the functionality of an item is provided through script hooks. Items implement hooks for all the various things that can be done to an item: onSpawn, onDrop, onPickup, onEquip, onUnEquip, onRightClick, etc... All of the goodies that an item can do are performed from these script hooks.

While I'm polishing up the item and inventory subsystems, I'm also doing more work on graphics. Mostly, I've been building trees and creating renders of various tree models. I've got an L-System script I found on the web (here, btw) that I use to generate the tree models. It's pretty danged nifty; gives lots of little buttons and slider bars and whatnot, most of which I haven't the foggiest idea of what they do. Allows you to select leaf pattern and size, etc... I set up a camera, render the trees to billboards, and map them onto impostors; voila, trees. i r teh cheatorz.

And since I haven't done a screenshot in awhile, here's one showing a blend of some of my latest terrain textures. I'm getting quite a collection of these textures, though I still haven't done any for artificial environments such as indoor/subterranean dungeons, etc... All natural stuff so far, because they're so danged easy to do. [grin]



This shot shows 4 layers. A dirt layer, which blends smoothly into a dark bluish rock layer that does fairly well as a mud layer when blended in this fashion. (Incidentally, that layer comes from the Ashlands tileset featured in previous screens). The blend is a simple perlin noise map. Then there is a grass layer, and a dirt-grass transitional for grassy fringes. I'm still tweaking on the fringe layer, right now it looks a little strange. The grass is fairly standard, and not new.