The Infinite Kingdom

It seems that FreeHg, my Mercurial repository host, has been torn down. I will try to move my source code elsewhere so that it can be downloaded once more. It's a shame, since I rather liked the fact that FreeHg was a simple, no-frills host (which didn't charge me money).

I have decided to call the editing tool "TIK level editor" or Tikle for short. It currently works fairly well, with support for flood fills and area resizing.

Here is an early screencast of how the game development is going.

The latest version of TIK may be obtained from http://freehg.org/u/dismal_denizen/tik/. Make sure that you have the JDK and ant installed, and then you can execute "ant run" in the directory to see the game in action.

To improve the realism of the game (and make life a living hell for players), I have implemented a vision system based on the field of view algorithm provided by RLforJ. Cells which have not yet been seen are black, cells which have been seen before are rendered as last seen (they are not updated), with a fog over them. Currently visible cells are rendered normally, and updated when they change.
This screenshot shows the system in action.

I managed to damage some part of OpenGL while coding today, after a run of TIK crashed the Java VM. Subsequent test runs of TIK spewed out the following exception and failed to initialize:

Exception in thread "main" org.lwjgl.opengl.OpenGLException: Cannot use Buffers when Pixel Unpack Buffer Object is enabled

The aim of The Infinite Kingdom is to create an open source D&D-based RPG game framework so that the community can create content themselves. Hopefully the result will be a really in-depth game that continually expands.

If you have been following the development of TIK (which I highly doubt), you would have noticed that I deleted all blog entries on this site. This is because I am starting again, this time in 2 dimensions. Making TIK a 3D game turned out to be overkill, and opened the door to an unreasonable amount of bugs. Instead I have decided to use Slick as my game engine and drop a dimension.

Advantages:

• Game size is smaller, and therefore easier to download
• Less bugs
• It is easier to create content